New Year's Fun - Part I

During the week between Christmas and New Year I was whining about how pure gantin' furrit I get during that stretch of time. Now I don't mean this blog to be a confessional. It's one thing to try and not lead a compulsively secret life. Even for me, there's a limit on sharing every last little thing I get up to when it comes to the kinky stuff. Then again, these two escapades are waaaay too good not to share. Two nice, imaginative, kinky ladies actually took pity on me and put me to good use.

First, Alisa from "Kink In Exile" sent me on a "wild goose chase". Instead of geese I was chasing tea, which she adores. In this town, finding tea is really not too hard and finding an exotic tea is only slightly more difficult. But she wanted the truly unusual. An interesting story about processing or origin. I love a challenge, so I researched tea places and became reassured that the city I love really is not in imminent danger of becoming one big multiplex mall, as I often worry it may be. I found "Sympathy For The Kettle" in the East Village. Their website lists many different flavored black teas which was my quarry. So off I went to Saint Mark's Place between First and A.

When I first moved to New York City in the 70's I worked in this neighborhood at a shelter for runaway teenage girls. It was a crazy, gritty, dangerous, wild neighborhood. Now there's a great little tea boutique there. I walked in and announced my search for a flavorful black tea with a unique backstory. Without missing a beat - almost as though I had meant to pose her this question - the lovely, pregnant, slightly mystical propriatrix produced their Harlequin tea. She told me that she and her husband love the countryside in Oxfordshire, England and were exploring it one day when they came upon huge patches of wild, sweet blackberries. Since they love to blend natural fruits into their stout black teas they were overjoyed.

However, the perfect luscious berries were surrounded by great swathes of stinging nettles. Undeterred, and being consumately intrepid tea minglers, they braved the nettles and harvested a crop of the sweetest, tartest, most perfect berries imaginable. They did, however, pay the price inflicted by the nettles. I like to think they did so willingly, gladly, and joyously.

In flawless recognition of the true nature of their harvest they mixed in the stinging nettles with the succulent berries to create what I can only describe as the perfect bdsm tea. Don't you agree? The sweetness of the berry ... the lash of the nettle?

I presented the tea and a card with a shorter version of the backstory pasted neatly on one side and a little hand written note on the other to Alisa at our lunch at Balthazar. (She had a salad, I had the omlette with gruyere) On a gloomy, chilly, rainy New York winter's day, the whole process brightened my New Year's mood. I hope she likes the sipping as much as I liked the questing.

But hey, that's an awfully tame story for a bdsm blog. Didn't I say there was another hot kinky lady who took pity on me? I did didn't I. It was my friend Crimson ... and does she have one deliciously devious mind!!! But yer gonna have to wait on that one, dear readers. Same Bat-time ... same Bat-channel. And if ya think I'm some kinda hunter gatherer saint, just you wait ... you'll never make a saint of me.

Postscript

She's wearing a tight, white, man-beater t-shirt; oh-so-short, faded denim cutoffs with frayed holes in the backpockets to intentionally allow a teasing glimpse of flesh; and rugged, tight-laced hiking boots. She directs him to strip. As she lightly smacks the switch she just had him cut from the nearby birch against the palm of her well tanned hand, she tells him to clear a path through the nettles. If she's stung once he'll be beaten mercilessly.

Later, his aging, well muscled body covered in welts from the stinging nettles, but sadly spared the cut of the rod as he had done his job properly, he lies beneath her as she sits in the small, folding, single seat they brought. She happily munches on the succulent blackberries she bid him gather. He eagerly rubs her tired feet, sore from the day's search for tea ingredients. As she feeds him a berry wrapped in a nettle leaf she says, "I think we should call it Harlequin."