Why Men Go to Prostitutes

A cultural anthropologist once told me men go to prostitutes to cede control; to have even just a short space of time when somebody else is responsible and this makes sense to me. As a onetime teacher I feel this way every time I go to a lecture that I’m not giving. As a person who gets asked to give talks that bring people to that itch-at the back-of the-throat moment when laughter and tears vie I feel it too: thank God it’s not me up there trying to pull of that high-wire act.  (And if you’re not sure who the experts are at getting you to that moment doe think Billy Crystal in his one man show 700 Sundays; think Robin Williams in his best movie roles, like when he played Adrian Cronauer in the 1987 movie Good Morning Vietnam. (Think of his face as he watches the troop convoy passing him? Boy after doomed golden boy laughing and waving, recognizing him as the funny guy on the radio who helped keep them from losing their minds in that terrible Through the Looking Glass war.)I feel control ebb away every time I have to go Massachusetts General Hospital to have some painful piece of fixing done, like when one of the particularly deft magicians there uses an electron microscope practically to insert kenalog into the messed-up joints of my cervical vertebrae.I feel it leave very time I lift off in a plane, at that alarming moment when with an unsettlingly loud thunk! the landing gear gets sucked back up into that big bird body. You look down and think Aargh where is earth? What if we crash? What if I never see those dear faces again? And then you just…. let go. Because somebody’s in charge and it isn’t you and for once, for this one little short while , you get to practice the spiritual gift of surrender.Now here’s Robin as DJ Adrian just doing the funny thing. Good way to start a Friday I think.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8gndbh4ZMo&NR=1]