From A Little Burlesque:

 

Two new girls in one week?  Les Trois Dames Jouissantes was going to hell in a hand basket!

 

No, scratch that—an exaggeration for comedic effect.

 

Truth was, Madame Mireille took good care of her girls.  In fact, the burlesque house was probably the safest place for most of ‘em.  Would Madame steer her girls in the wrong direction?  Never!  Would she give them bad advice?  Unthinkable!

 

That’s not to say their devoted proprietress didn’t have one eye on the bottom line, only that she never lost sight of who brought in the clams.  Burlesque was a collective effort.  If the girls weren’t jouissantes, Trois Dames would lose its atmosphere of fun and frivolity, and without that thrill of titillation the jerks might as well stay at home with their wives.

 

But enough about business.  Back to the new girls.

 

The first one arrived Thursday of last week, calling herself ‘Kitty.’  A fresh moniker was an escape for these girls, Mireille realized.  The very act of selecting a spanking new name allowed them to cast off former identities the way snakes slipped out of old skins.  Speaking of which, Madame Mireille still needed to replace Sheba’s cobra act.

 

“Please tell me you’re not afraid of snakes,” Mireille implored the lithe blonde, even before asking the girl to take it all off.

 

 

From Ondine:

 

Imelda and Gavin married on a whim at the barefoot outdoor wedding of flower-child friends.  Was it a smart decision?  Who’s to say?  After all, they did share identical life philosophies. For them, free love was not merely a licence to licentiousness, it was an actual shift in consciousness.

 

The hippie movement allowed women to finally assert themselves as sexual beings without shame or embarrassment.  Free love challenged the beliefs many held that women were merely men’s property.  The free-loving hippies were out there saying, No way man!  We women don’t belong to our husbands.  We weren’t born to serve them and to devote our lives to making them happy.  And never would Imelda find another man who believed so strongly in the feminist principles of free love as Gavin did.

 

Their untamed wedding night marked the perfect beginning to a free-loving marriage.  The summer sky was mild.  Stars above.  Firelight.  Song.

 

Longhaired guests danced about the pit of flames in orbits representing the planets of the solar system.  Barefoot bohemians entranced by the deep moanings of the didgeridoo were overtaken by the beat of the tribal drum.  The sounds of sacred instruments resonated deeply within them, arousing the energies of their base chakras.  The intense vibrations tantalized not only the flesh, but the very essence of their beings on an atomic scale.  The macrocosmic force of music impacted them at the microcosmic level of the flesh.

 

In the heat of fire and dance, shirts came off first, then jeans and long skirts.  Stripping bare, some friends tossed their clothes into the roaring flames.  When exhaustion set in, free spirits retired to the outer orbits where movement was slow and sensual.  In the shadows of the cyclical fire dance, naked bodies writhed, some in pairs, some in heaps.  In the frenzied environ of the fire dance, every configuration was groovy, man.

 

Spreading herself on a picnic table in the public park, Imelda presented her naked body as a feast for the guests.  Let their souls derive nourishment from the light of this sacred being.