Salon.com > Deirdre Guthrie

The Erin Brockovich of the bonobo

Thu, 18 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Dr. Susan Block calls herself the "Erin
Brockovich of the bonobo." Yet she's not
crusading against a power company
poisoning ground water, she's fighting
for a sexual revolution, and she's
drafted one of Homo sapiens' closest
relatives to help her in battle.

Like the cleavage-baring Brockovich,
Block, star of two HBO specials and "The
Dr. Susan Block Show," which runs
Saturdays on cable TV in San Francisco
and Los Angeles, tends to get flak for
her combat fatigues. Propped amid
ostrich feathers and dildos, she plies
her trade in lacy lingerie, teaching her
eager audience how to have "bigger
orgasms and better relationships" from
in between the satin sheets of her
"broadcast bed."

Block's TV constituency has been
described by Detour magazine critic Dale
Brasel as an "ever-growing cult
following ... Unlike Dr. Ruth," writes
Brasel, "you can actually believe she's
had and is still having sex. Good sex."

Sexual healing, jungle style

Fri, 03 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The Australian who had introduced himself as Akim handed me an umbrella and yelled over the rain that I would be given a proper tour in the morning. I nodded and closed the patio door of the Tican guest house, watching his angular form plod down the path, his footsteps making little splashes against the stones, until the dark mist enveloped him.

My room had a sloped ceiling and doors that swelled in their frames. The walls were a shrieking orange, mustard curtains offset the rain-streaked windows and a tangerine bird of paradise crooked its beak from a clay pot on the sill. The air was pungent with perfume, which I eventually traced to a single lilac wilting in a water glass next to my bed.

I flopped down beside it, weary from the bumpy ascent from the San Josi airport by jeep, lurching over boulders slick with mud. As the road, overgrown with jungle debris, had narrowed, my driver Enrique had cursed the plantation owner who'd refused to pave it.

"Course why should he fix a road for his coffee pickers who will never travel beyond the boundary of this plantation?" he'd shrugged.

When our journey had ended in front of an iron gate rimmed with barbed wire, Enrique had smiled at my surprise.

Getting over it

Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

A cappuccino con creme in Paris costs $5. I sip the drink and am not consoled by the green paper umbrella sticking out from the cloud of whipped cream. I crudely play with the toy like a vulgar American. Open close open close.

Since my arrival yesterday I've been inordinately clumsy. I keep tripping, spilling coffee, knocking over chairs. My ballerina hostess, a stunning girl with long, plaited hair, high cheekbones and lips painted every day with an impeccable smear of red gloss, is very tolerant if not terminally cheerful.

"New York City is my dream!" she exclaims, when she hears that I'd moved there from Montana's big sky country. She insists we go to Shakespeare and Company to search out a magazine that has published one of my stories.

Later we return to her farmhouse, and I pull up my quilt and recall the steady, chugging train of events that provoked me to cross the Atlantic onto foreign soil, decidedly away from the dream of New York.