Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
Dating Advice From . . . Engineers by Steph Auteri Q. For optimal functionality, what should go into a first-date emergency kit? A. Fine wine, road flares, a snake-bite kit and Ghirardelli chocolates.
Some women fantasize about sex with gorgeous, romantic partners, some imagine
being ravaged by heartless misfits, but Kitty Lyons, a thirty-something downtown
American minx of uncertain means, releases her psychic and physical tensions
through sexual encounters with some of the world's most powerful (if least
likely) objects of desire. No matter how over-hyped the world's movers and
shakers prove to be as moral paragons, Kitty, sprawled on her ruby red sofa,
manages to distill personal pleasure from their media icons by summoning up
their mundane humanity — not to mention their limitless desire for her.
Over the years she has climaxed with newsworthy and notable media action figures
from
Alan Greenspan and
Lizzie Grubman to
Dick Cheney.
Ms. Lyons has needed every minute of pleasure she can wrest from history's jaws.
Her dot.com career has taken her from e-trader to temp, and her marriage to Max —
a handsome and moderately successful cameraman/filmmaker — is riddled with
tension.
A couple of years ago, when Max needed funding for his documentary,
"Homebuilding in the Heartland," Kitty had him impersonate
Donald Trump — with disastrous results. While they both had great fun at the time, Max had a
bad reaction to internalizing a man so much richer and more dastardly than
himself, and came to believe (as do nearly 50% of Americans polled, according to
the New York Times), that fantasizing about others constitutes a form of marital
infidelity.
Max retaliated against Kitty's busy fantasy life by bolstering his ego — and
his bottom line — in the arms of a Belgian heiress who was interested in
funding his film. Kitty
found out, and the
discovery brought her close to acting out her fantasies with a mysterious
stranger in a
chat room. Max
eventually apologized and returned, more or less, to
monogamy, after which a long stand-off ensued, in which Kitty kept her
autoerotic fantasy life secret and separate from her
marriage.
But over Thanksgiving of 2001, thanks in part to her born-again stepmother and
Osama bin Laden (and
the sexual restrictions they represent), Max started to come around to Kitty's viewpoint.
In 2002, Readers can look forward to Max playing many more roles than he has in
the past, and Kitty will be dealing for the first time with what it's like to
entertain sex fantasies about power when she's not entirely in control.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
