I like this photograph. Steve Prue took it on Friday night at Exxxotica Chicago. 

When I was a small child and dead set on being a ballet dancer when I grew up, I had this teacher. She was tough. Compliments weren’t given often, when they were they really meant something. She believed in sweat, good pain, and struggling towards perfection. After one performance, she asked how I thought I had done. I said I thought I’d done ok. She then told me that if I don’t come off stage thinking of at least five things that I will do better next time, I might as well quit and take up running or knitting or field hockey instead.

Having taken that lesson to heart, I could nitpick my performances for hours. I do nitpick my performances for hours. I enjoy obsessing over how to make things more interesting, efficient, prettier. I pay people who have far more experience than I do to watch me train or rehearse and yell out constant criticism. This is what it takes to have a hope of being competent. Martha Graham (one of the pioneers of Contemporary Dance) is quoted as saying “No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching…” Complacency will get you absolutely nowhere. Anything worth doing is difficult and requires hard work.

I do pull ups and leg lifts until I feel like I can’t do any more, and then I cooperate when an instructor insists that I do another three. Full disclosure: this cooperation is usually accompanied by whining and muttered profanities. I’ve torn bleeding holes in the skin on my palms and the backs of my knees. I have hard-won calluses in those places now. I’m proud of them. The frequency of hand-job requests from my sexual partners has declined drastically. I perform without a crash mat, if I fall during a show I’m hitting the hard, unforgiving floor… probably with part of my spine. When you know that falling could result in serious injury, it adds a little extra motivation to stay in the air. If I leave a training session with an ounce of energy left, that means I was either doing it wrong or need to look for more challenging exercises and tricks… and this is pretty much a hobby for me. You don’t want to know what the full-time professionals put themselves through.

Which brings me to the things that make all of this worth it: the people you see on the left side of this picture. The people taking the time to stop and watch me perform for them. The people clapping to express their entertainment and pleasure when I do something they like. The people who chase me down after a show with compliments. Every single one of those people is wonderful, and Chicago was a particularly great crowd.

My career in pornography has been/still is pretty cool and all, but there is nothing in the world I love more than finishing a live performance knowing that I was better than I was the time before and hearing the applause of an audience who appreciated it. Thank you.

Moscow, to be precise. In the same way that some people may think of the USA as the place where Hollywood movies and McDonald’s come from, I think of Russia as a cold, snowy place that produces the most amazing dancers and acrobats in the world. It may not be entirely accurate all of the time, and (not to mention the rest of the huge Russian Federation) there is far more to Moscow than just those four qualities, but they would be my elevator pitch for Russia if I ever had to give one.

The baggage claim looked like something out of the 70s. All harvest golds and deep browns. Customs was easy to navigate and I felt right at home in my giant fur coat. Some people rescue animals from the humane society. I rescue aesthetically pleasing dead ones from thrift stores in Connecticut. I stood in Red Square at 4am and had a friend take a picture with my cell phone.

Look at the snow falling! Look at my giant smile!

Later in the week, some very nice men arranged for me to train at one of the government circus schools. I won’t give any identifying details because they may not want to be associated with porn on the internet, but they do have my gratitude and appreciation. Upon arriving at the training facility I was told that I wasn’t actual going to be able to train because I wasn’t Russian. Then I was going to be able to train but only after a physical and some blood samples. At some point an older man poked his head into the office where this was being discussed, looked me up and down, and declared me healthy. The subject of a physical was dropped and I was taken into the actual training area. 

There are no pictures because at that point I wasn’t about to risk blowing the deal. Instead, please enjoy this picture of my hand petting a random puppy at a bar.

If puppies aren’t your thing, here is a humorous napkin from the same bar.

The hoop/lyra’s diameter was a good six inches smaller than I’m used to working on, there was a bar across the top-middle, and a steel cable meant to hook onto a safety harness was wrapped around the top at the place my right hand usually goes. The coach didn’t speak a word of English, I don’t speak any useful Russian, and the interpreter didn’t know anything about acrobatics. Circus doesn’t have much of a standard vocabulary anyway… a back flag is a side planche is a “this thing” depending on who you’re talking to. So we threw words out the window. He had me run through a couple of tricks, tapped a knee to indicate it wasn’t entirely straight, pushed on a hip to say it was out of alignment. This is how my ballet instructors worked when I was younger, I know this language. 

Also, no one needed to translate his laughter when I smacked my head on that damn middle bar for the third time. 

Once we were communicating effectively and he’d evaluated my abilities and strength, he started moving my limbs around into new positions. At one point he had me dangling from one armpit. My arm felt like might actually just fall off and the only reason I wasn’t panicking was trust in this man’s abilities as a trainer and coach. Then he squished my mouth into a smile and spun me. Yep… physically moved my face into the expression he wanted, turn-that-frown-upside-down style, and then started spinning the apparatus I was hanging from. Adding the spin makes things much more interesting. It wasn’t as pretty as it could have been, but I hung on and eventually got down in one piece. If he’d told me with words before hand what the plan was, I would have refused to even try it.

The key thing here is trust. There’s a lot of wiggle room between my perceived limitations and my actual limitations. I am amazed by the things that I am capable of when I trust someone to push me past my perceived limits. This was really supposed to segue into a discussion about the value of trust in sex and James Deen’s ability to pleasurably get his dick in my ass at 1am towards the end of a long day on set, but it just isn’t going to happen. I really wanted those organic-transition-into-shameless-Digital-Playground-product-promotion bonus points. Oh well. Instead, here is a mediocre camera phone picture of the Kremlin at night in the snow. 

Lyra/Aerial Hoop

Yes, that’s me.

Yes, it kind of hurts.

Yes, it’s absolutely worth it.