Yikes! I’m at my first school parent’s party and everyone’s a Swinger, but me.

Somewhere in Bondi, on a street leading to the ocean, a black lacquered door throbs and music and a golden doorknob beckons.

A band of navy Italian lace silk fringing falls from my hips, skimming my thighs. 

I suck my belly button back to my spine, check my boobies are still bound inside my bandage top, shoulder roll my men’s pinstripe blazer and reach for the curve of the golden orb.

The golden knob slips from my grasp as the door swings wide.

My confronted eyelashes tremble under the welcoming wink of an oiled navel and golden G-string.

The greeting is unexpected and magnificent.

I offer up my invitation in the sobering event that I am definitely not expected at this party. I have been invited by parents of a five-year-old friend of my daughters, our daughter’s new friends at a private co-ed school in Sydney. I don’t think golden knobs and G-strings are part of the mixing and mingling at that party.

PARTY INVITATION

On a smooth high gloss 9 by 20cm photographic card dance three naked woman, texture and movement supplied by their 70s’ styled pubic hair fullness.

Dress code: Sexy cool

Theme: 007 meets Barry White

Champagne pops my gaping mouth shut. I’m in.

I pad across the wide oaked black Japanese Oak floors on my tippy toes – I really don’t want to puncture these floors with my heels – to a tram carriage, embedded flush in the cavernous rooms right wall. I discover this is the host’s dining room – the carriage sits empty and waiting like the rest of the party, awaiting new conductors and passengers.

It is  spectacular.

I am excited and nervous all at once and I shiver like Christmas Eve with silent promise for the night.

The World is Not Enough

Bond: “I was wrong about you.”
Christmas Jones: “Yeah, how so?”
Bond: “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.”

Beyond the room a sail clothed canopy hangs above an outdoor DJ, circling a tinkling bar with a throb of clustered bodies.

A dancing lunatic pulls me on to the dance floor.

I am completely ill at ease.

A handsome stranger rescues me.

I am completely at ease.

This shot taken of me completely at ease with friends a night before.

In fact the party is full of throbs of people really at ease. As I elbow beat off  a throng of strangers – who are now intimate with the size of my facial pores – I watch the room.

The room is full of clusters of people, really into getting to know people they have just met.

I look at the wad of business cards that have been pressed into my hand by all of my new friends and contacts at this party.

For some strange reason I feel like the main course.

There are no leery eyed stares, just people enjoying a luxurious party with all the trimmings, fresh delectable canapés, chilled golden flutes of erupting French champagne and two-legged predators with smiles of inarticulate longing.

As I walk upstairs to find a bathroom, candle lit water bowls with floating frangipani dot paths to the King size beds.

A strange little man jumps from the shadows and pulls me towards a bed.

I break free in an ugly jig to the stairs – trying to look cool and stride two stairs at a time, away, away from my creepy little leaping guy. 

This party is for a select group of people, with a select group of rules.

Swingers.

Swapping loved ones and partners and sharing sexual pleasures with strangers with consent from your other half.

I’m not good at sharing and know I’m not playing. From the dance floor fringe shadows hover close and I know I’m not the only one feeling this way.

A woman I know embedded  in the shadows, watches her husband get it on with another on the dance floor. And as her loved one shows his moves to another she doesn’t look excited, turned-on or angry, she looks sad.

I turn and  head for the golden knobbed door – perhaps all that glitters is not so golden after all.

007 house rules, to kiss without telling and like 007, I leave early.

Sex, is a game best played by choice.

Remember to choose which game you are playing, before the game you are playing chooses you.

Johnny Depp.

‘If you love two people at the same time, choose the second.

Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn’t have fallen for the second’.