Motherhood and Celebrity Penises
October 3rd, 2008by Jessica Anya Blau
BALTIMORE, MD-
One question I am often asked by readers of my novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, is “Have your daughters read it?!” The question is always asked in a way that demands at least one exclamation point, as the novel is full of sex and has some mild drug use. The answer is one daughter has read it, the other has not. I’m not too worried about it—it’s a novel, it’s fiction. What I worry about more is blogging—the real world, my real world and my kids’ easy access to it. With that in mind, I shall proceed anyway to tell you about one of my experiences with a celebrity penis.
I once spent a weekend in Los Angeles with a somewhat-famous, male, sex-symbolish celebrity whom I shall call Celebrity (we were both guests in the same chic, glass, hillside home). On the first night of my arrival my friend (blond, petite, movie producer) opened champagne while her boyfriend (cagey, tall, talent agent) poured cocaine from a plastic bag into little anthills in even rows on the marble coffee table in the living room. Also present at this party were Celebrity (of course!) and his screenwriter pal, a mutt-haired, middle aged guy who only talked about his Harley.
For most of the evening I sat alone on a black, leather plank couch and watched and listened
while Celebrity and the others did sweeping, piggish snorts across the table using the same stunted silver straw. 
(I’d recently abandoned alcohol and all else, and so remained sober throughout the somewhat drug-laden weekend.) During the conversation, Celebrity often took center stage, chattering about prep school pranks and girls he had slept with. He was at once compelling (his onscreen persona in one of my all-time favorite movies was utterly captivating) and repellent with his endless exposition on himself. Celebrity seemed vaguely interested in me as extended eye contact occurred a few times and once he took my arm and escorted me around a room to show me a painting. I’m fairly certain that his attraction to me was not about me in particular as much as it was about the fact that I was the only one at the house who wasn’t used to being around famous people and so the only one who seemed (and was) impressed by him. 
He asked nothing about me and I spoke very little (it was like my first date in ninth grade when I went out with the most popular senior boy in the school. I was ridiculously quiet, like a stunned rabbit trapped in a garden.). In case you’re wondering, I shall let it be known right now that our flirtation did not go beyond eye contact and it is highly unlikely that Celebrity even remembers our time together, while I, sadly, can recall every detail.
The most interesting part of the weekend occurred on Sunday morning. I woke up somewhat late and stumbled out of my bedroom. I was wearing a black, silk nightgown that almost looked like a dress. My long hair was a straggled mess, like I’d just dismounted a motorcycle. No make up, cracked lips, crumbs in my eyes. I imagine I looked like some haggard woman stepping out of her mountain shack to chase the goats away from the turnip patch.
Outside my room was a glass wall that surrounded the pool. On the other side of that wall was Celebrity. He was completely naked. I walked along the glass wall towards the glass door that opened up to the pool. Celebrity walked along beside me, holding my boggy-eyed stare the whole way—it was like Marcel Marceau doing the mirror act with another mime. When I opened the door and stepped out to the pool, Celebrity asked if I wanted a swim. I declined and instead sat on a lawn chair with the Sunday L.A. Times and watched as Celebrity dove in, climbed out, mounted the diving board, dove in again and swam some plashy laps. 
Now here’s the most amazing thing about this moment: Celebrity had the smallest penis I’d ever seen in real life. And it was as white as flour. It looked like a powdered thumbtack pushed into his pubic patch. I was astounded. 
Tiny penises are fine by me; I certainly don’t care and would never criticize anyone because they have a tiny penis (I’d hate to read the blogger who got a good gander at me strolling around naked!). What shocked me was that Celebrity seemed to have no shame in his penis—no worry that I would reveal to anyone the fact of his thumbtack. How marvelous to be so comfortable with whatever you were given at birth. How liberating to think, “This is it! Voila! Take it or leave it!” How fabulous to go through life believing that everyone finds you fascinating and has only adoration for your less-than-a-miniature-gherkin penis! (Alas, I do not have Celebrity’s non-judgmental self-acceptance. If I leave a room naked and someone else is in that room–my husband, for example–I back my way to the door so as to spare him the view of my undulating rear.)
Her husband's on the other side--she's backing up.
This brings me to my problem with blogging: the easy access, the eternal life on the internet. If someone were to type into Google Jessica anya blau tiny penis would they pull up this blog? Would my daughters be forever ashamed because their mother wrote a nonfiction posting about a weency celebrity penis?
Let’s hope not.
Tags: big butt, celebrity penises, champagne, cocaine, los angeles, old hag, the summer of naked swim parties
Yup, search those terms yourself in a few days and I bet this post will shoot up higher in your Google rankings than any thumb tack could ever reach.
What was the celebs name?
You can’t just expose genitals and keep back the name… unfair!
I suppose if I added Celebrity’s name it would really get a few google hits!
Can’t do it. Seems way too cruel.
Who do you think it is?!
I have no idea although I’m sure you added subtle hints.
Didn’t you ever watch Seinfeld?
Shrinkage.
You can’t judge size when a swimming pool is involved.
But no! I got a very good look at it when we did the glass wall walk BEFORE he dove in! He was dry as a piece of paper. In fact, it didn’t change when wet. Didn’t get smaller. Still a thumbtack.
jessica, i share your anxiety about motherhood, sex-filled novels of our own authorship, and personal blog postings that may share a bit more than our offspring were bargaining for. my own daughters (twins) are only 8 years old and far (far!) too young to read my first novel, which is basically riddled with dysfunctional, perverse sex, or to google me online and have the patience to read through any of my blog postings in which topics appear like snorting coke off the carseats of moving vehicles and having menage-a-quatres in high school or, say (more recently), dissing my mother-in-law, their grandmother. but the scary thing about cyberspace is that it’s really there for the long haul. interviews i gave 5 years ago still pop up with my name, so when my daughters are 13 and curious, all of this will still be floating in the ether.
(i’ll tell you though, i have a whole new incentive to be a prolific novelist so that by the time my kids are old enough to take any remote interest in reading my fiction, my nearly-x-rated first novel will be so far back there that they will basically forget all about it, ha. i now have a whole new appreciation for the fact that it was published with an indie press and is fairly obscure. if it had become a bestseller or something, i would be so fucked . . . )
OKay, you MUST say the name of this first novel so that we can all go out and buy it! PLease!
Are these forbidden blogs on this site, where can I find them?!
Cheers to writing a bestseller and being “so fucked,”–I say go for it!
Jessica, your kids will always be super-proud of you because you are a published author and a super-cool mom. No worries. No worries at all.
Thanks Irene. I love your relationship with Lenore–I hope my girls will be like her when they grow up!
Maybe he was just a “Grower” and not a “Shower”.
(Just trying to help restore the image of your Matinee Idol…)
He must have been a “grower” right? How else could he have had actual relations with the starlets he was speaking of the night before?! Also, perhaps he had an unusually dense patch of pubes–so maybe a stem was in there, but couldn’t be seen–like a dandelion dwarfed by knee-high grass.
And this is where my little waxing film comes into play!
One of the most common responses to men who trimmed, shaved or waxed their pubes was for ESP or, Enhanced Size Perception.
Yes, your FABULOUS FILM! And thanks for pointing out the benefits of man-scaping!
And that celebrity was Sherman Hensley.
Aaaah, VERY good guess! And when I think of Sherman Hemsley, walking around that east side apartment like a rooster on cocaine, yelling for Weezie, it does seem right that he would have a thumbtack penis, no?
Anyone else want to try and guess?
Well, if anyone’s seen “Eastern Promises” or “The Pillow Book” - you can safely rule out Viggo Mortensen and Ewan MacGregor.
And then there’s Harvey Keitel in The Piano and Richard Gere . . . don’t we see his penis somewhere? American Gigilo? How do you spell Gigilo?
Oh, there’s that wonderful bouncing penis on the sumo-wrestling-type guy in Sideways. Love that moment. Definitely not him. This celebrity penis would have no bounce.
Johnny Depp!
Oh, N.L., oh oh oh oh! If it were Johnny Depp, whom I adore, I wouldn’t have written the post!
Glad you’re sticking with the cool guy picture, by the way, and abandoning the cricket!
haha… ah you know Johnny is swinging the big stick anyway. I was just trying to piss off my gf who I know reads your posts….
I hear there’s going to be a new Captain Jack flick. Looking forward to his role in the Dillinger film too.
hey jessica–
my first novel is called My Sister’s Continent. when my mother-in-law read it, she did not speak to me for 5 months, and even refused to set foot in our house to visit her newborn grandson, because she was convinced i was a degenerate pervert. albeit she has some serious issues, ha. but an editor at houghton-mifflin once told my agent that the novel was “so disturbing i had to keep putting it down and leaving the room,” and another editor told him, “i couldn’t explain this novel to a marketing rep without blushing or breaking down,” so i guess my mother-in-law was not alone in finding it a little, shall we say, risque.
if my daughters ever read it, i will have to jump out a window with embarrassment. so yeah, please go ahead and buy it while i am still alive and can appreciate sales–as i mentioned in my other comment, i probably have about 5 years before they’re 13 and start sniffing around . . .
“so disturbing i had to keep putting it down and leaving the room,”
Now THAT’s the kind of blurb I like to see! Consider one more copy SOLD!
Two copies!
I’ll buy it, too! Glad your mother-in-law is talking to you again. I suppose she never brings it up, right? My ex-mother-in-law (mother of ex-husband) mentions my book in the context of having seen it on a table at Barnes and Noble, or seen it at an airport, etc. but does not talk about the ACTUAL book. I don’t know if she’s read it or not–but clearly the safe ground of discussion is where it’s being sold. Before my grandmother read my book, my aunt warned her that it was “risque.” It has been reported to me that my grandmother read it but she has never mentioned it to me, so I suppose it’s the verboten subject. Fine by me.
Let’s hope all our children forgive us!
For those of you interested, Gina’s novel, MY SISTER’S CONTINENT (which caused her mother-in-law to stop speaking to her) is available on Amazon. Here’s the great review from PW:
“Soon to be married, Kirby dreads the return to Chicago of her twin, Kendra, a ballerina. So severe is Kirby’s stress-induced intestinal malady, her father sends her to his shrink. Kendra is even more of a wreck: a back injury has ended her dancing life, leaving this anorexic, pill-popping sexual outlaw perilously at loose ends. But their father trumps all: he has AIDS. Under all this duress, Kirby begins to question her engagement and her sexuality, and Kendra, a devotee of pain, takes up with a colleague of her father’s who is proficient in sadomasochism. The adventurous editor of the literary magazine Other Voices, Frangello has parlayed Freud’s vision of female sexuality as a “dark continent” into a boldly explicit debut novel in which high-strung characters struggle to decode the mysteries of the self while their bodies express what their minds repress. Frangello is uncanny and mesmerizing in this smart, suspenseful psychosexual drama as she choreographs traumatic, possibly criminal, family dynamics, and delves fearlessly into questions of identity, abuse, power, trust, trespass, and delusion.”
Sounds great to me!
oh yeah. I’ll be ordering THAT book when I get home to my computer.
Sounds amazing!
Irene
Good God, Gina. I must go buy this at once. You are a mystery!
thanks for the pitch, jessica!
yes, my mother-in-law never brings it up anymore, ever. she does not even ask about my “writing” now, even in the most general of terms. i have a novel coming out in may, and my husband and i have literally not even told them about it. when my sister-in-law once mentioned it in front of my mother-in-law, i noticed my mother-in-law immediately turned to the person sitting next to her and started talking about something else. i think (and hope) that we all tacitly agree to forever-out pretend that i am not even a writer. yikes.
i should mention that my father-in-law is a presbyterian minister, to boot! thankfully he did not read it. his wife was having such a hissy fit that he just decided to avoid the ruckus and never get near the book so that he could be a neutral party!
Gina: Don’t forget to send me a review copy so I can blab about it all over the net and in my little media circle.
Gina: I mean your book next year, unless you want your current book still talked about.
It seems fine for you (Gina) not to tell them about it! They’re probably relieved. And when you go on book tour, your husband can tell them you’re at a church retreat, hanging out with James Dobson’s gang in Colorado. Might as well make them happy!
Actually, I just sent my mother the book I’m working on now and every time I talk to her on the phone she mutters something about what her mother (my grandmother) will think.
My response: Let’s not tell her about it! She’s in New Hampshire–it’s pretty easy to hide a book from a ninety-year woman in New Hampshire. (Although she is rather frisky–walking the dog every day and tending to her sheep.)
Yeah, I’m guessing there is not a Barnes & Noble out behind the sheep pen (if, um, sheep live in a pen. I’m from the city . . .)
I’m thinking I should give my mother-in-law a copy of YOUR novel next Mother’s Day . . .
Jessica, 2 things:
1. I really dig your writing style. As in, I want to study it. You have a gift.
2. THUMBTACK??? Criminy. Awkward moment. I would love to join in the celebrity speculation, but all the good ones have already been taken. Am so glad it wasn’t Johnny. Not my Johnny.
Keep the posts rolling!
THanks Erika–you’re very kind!
Yes, we all know just by looking at Johnny that he’s exactly what we want in every way.
Have you ever noticed that he seems to only date girls with giant tweedy-bird foreheads: supermodel Kate Moss, Juliette Lewis, and now Vanessa Paradis. I’m surprised he never dated Soon-Yi as she has one of those foreheads, too. Although, I suppose she was always way too young for him, then once she was of legal age, Woody swiped her.