NGR goes back to school

I love to read. It really is just one of my favorite things. I switch back an forth between fiction and non-fiction when choosing my next book from my library. Going to a book store is full of so many possibilities. An actual book, with paper pages, not a computer screen, is magical.

There is a grander magic in reading to someone. I read to William every night for over a year. The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the complete Sherlock Holmes canon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and more. It's an amazing bonding experience, full of adventures, cliffhangers, and epiphanies. And it's fun to give voice to so many characters.

Do you know what another of my favorite things is?

Guess....

It's naked women.

No surprise there, right?

And there is an organization that caters to both: Naked Girls Reading.

That's right, women, without clothes, reading to you, the audience. Each girl comes out, sits in a comfy chair (or stands) and reads from a book for fifteen minutes.

This was my second visit to their Portland show. And they read absolutely amazing works.

The first show was geek themed, reading selections from Sci-fi and fantasy classics. We had excerpts from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. It is at times enlightening, funny, and heart touching. So much so that you almost forget these women are naked.

...Almost...

These are fantastic women. Members of the local burlesque circuit mostly. They know how to be naked without being slutty. They are perfectly classy and entirely beautiful (without having that "perfect" Barbie doll look).

This time around, the theme was "Back to School". The idea being these are the books we read as kids, the type of stuff you were likely to buy at the Book Fair. I was reading Hardy Boys and Time Machine (a spin-off of the Choose Your Own Adventure) at the age seemingly favored by the selections. What we go was a rendition of The Giving Tree, a bit from a Goosebumps book, as well as a fantastic chapter from The Phantom Tollbooth.

The only bad part of the show was the venue. A place called the Blue Monk in SE on Belmont. We were in a basement that may be nicely intimate, but the horrid lighting proved an issue for our lovely readers, who often had to find a new location on the stage and angle to the lights in order to see their books.

All in all, a truly amazing experience and good time. I can't wait for their next return to PDX.