Directly north of Burkhart Studios in the up-scale Lakeview neighborhood, yellow stripes mark off the parking lot for Comedy Sports Theater. Primarily designated as theater parking, the lot is also used by all sorts of illegal and alien parkers during daylight hours, some of which are visitors to the Fertility Center on the opposite side of Burkhart's Illustrated Den of Iniquity.

That particular location used to house the only BMW dealer in town, until Illinois Masonic Hospital offered to trade the car dealer a preferred property in the Gold Coast section of town, close to where the Playboy Club used to sit. Good bye exhaust fumes, hello cloning gases.

On any day but Sunday, a continuous stream flowed past my studio, in search of the Secret to Life, made of staunch, uptight women (sometimes with their men in tow) looking for the entrance to the Fertility Center, the modern-day Garden of Eden. Envision a flood of spermatozoa, tentatively pushing their wet way through the rusted but still swinging doors of the fallopian tube.

One of my wizened friends from the street told me it was really a cloning center. Maybe she was right. When I look around and observe all of the new condos being erected on all sides, I can understand the need for a steady supply of identically programmed and determined occupants to inhabit them. Every block the same: a Starbucks, a bank or two, a handful of sports bars to further anesthetize the credit bearers. A nest of eyes, a crest of fears, a baby's cries, a child's tears, a pack of lies, a peer's leers, fewer men to make room for the queers - so says the bard.

One afternoon in late summer a model named Robin came over to play and photograph, and she decided to do it in the back yard -- out doors, under the elms of a 100-year old cottonwood, on a makeshift stage I had built as an extension of my arts community, theater, coffeehouse - rather than under the security of a shuttered room inside. Once outside, Robin tossed a huge piece of rope over the lowest branch of the old tree that frustrated the rest of the neighborhood with its annual seeding and subsequent floating of fluffy cotton blossoms into open doors and windows and air conditioning units within a two block radius.

But that tree looked and felt so good sitting there smack dab in the middle of the highest concentration of yuppies in America , peripherally acting like a beacon for the passing lost souls that still passed the place looking for the neighborhood that used to be there! And it definitely belonged in the back of a building that looked a little like Noah's Ark searching for a place to land.

Once the rope was secure, Robin stripped down to her bare naked body and began to work herself up the rope, like a stripper riding her pole, a squirrel with its bushy tail wafting in the wind. "Got any tea," she wanted to know from her lofty perch.

"Sure." Not only did I have the tea -- bulk, in bags, or as tinctures -- I also had a child's china tea set and fold up picnic table recently brought home from the thrift store for such a moment. Oh yeah. and a plastic squeeze bottle of SueBee honey.

"Well let's have a tea party!" she exclaimed, like a bat out of hell, hanging upside down, hair falling over her mouth and dancing as she spoke through it. "A Mad Hatter's Tea Party!"

I was just setting the table when Rachel approached from the parking lot, having heard our laughter from the back yard: "Hey Burkhart, I was just passing by. mind if I hang out for awhile?" She hadn't yet noticed Robin hanging out.

"We were just going to have a tea party," Robin squealed with delight. "Take off your top and join us!"

By the time I got back downstairs with the boiling water, Robin and Rachel were at the picnic table, comparing notes. "Burkhart and I are doing a photo shoot." "Oh." "Wanna get in the picture?" "I don't know, maybe." "Then take your clothes off!" Robin laughed as she reached over to Rachel right where she sat and hoisted the shirt up over her head. Rachel didn't resist, raising her arms and letting the garment slide over her head, exposing her braless midriff to the watchful sun. "Awesome!" somebody said.

Burkhart served the tea and sat down opposite the two women, sipping noisily from his own cup with pleasure. Soon Robin was up the rope again, and Rachel stood stretching her lithe torso in the direction of the sun. An amazing scene, as common place and ordinary as any that seemed to go unnoticed by the upscale condo dwellers, as they walked their miniature horse-size dogs passed the perimeters that bordered three sides of the Ark.

"Give me that honey bear," Robin demanded. She had looped the rope around her waist and was hanging upside down, moving rhythmically like a pendulum, back and forth over the picnic table and Burkhart's head. He passed the honey on up to her, and within minutes she had the entire pint jar squeezed out and dripping down over her breasts, belly and pubic hair, dripping lazily in the afternoon sun.

"Burkhart, here. get some of this SueBee for your tea!" Robin lowered herself down the length of the rope, hovering her honey colored sticky body over my bearded face. With fingers and tongue and lips I indulged myself of the nectar, coating my face in a translucent haze not unlike the crystal waves of a slow motion waterfall.

Our reverie was soon interrupted by footsteps in the parking lot, sounding in the hazy afternoon sun of our garden like a sharp rapid volley of gunfire, staccato-like and blood curdling, and absolutely unnatural to our shoeless souls. A woman was approaching, oriental, medium build, returning to her car after a visit to the Fertility House.

Quickly I was on my feet. "Eh, m'am, there's nude filming going on, please proceed with caution."

Well, her determined Nazi-like gait abruptly came to a halt and was replaced with the uptight tentative steps with which she had first approached the sperm bank. God only knows which technique she used upon entering the bedroom. But either stance clearly confirmed why this woman was unable to conceive in the relative comfort of her own home, forcing her instead to venture out and beyond in search of a clinically clean and hermetically sealed antiseptic syringe phantom phallus lover to do the dirt for her.

The woman could not move, stopped dead in her tracks by the very notion of nudity in her presence. She froze, as she must also have frozen so many nights since that weekend in Disneyland with the American husband who paid her way over, observing his flag at full mast and red, white and blue all over.

I took the initiative, as a good lover/sperm-donor must. "Ahem. Now hear this. Proceed directly to your automobile. Look straight forward. Under no circumstance should you diver gaze in this direction." And it worked! She did just what the doctor ordered, inching slowly towards her Nissan, one step in front of the other, never looking back, or anywhere else for that matter. Another Pearl Harbor averted. The newly implanted sperms were free to swim downstream again, searching for the ultimate egg to hatch her legacy.

Whew! We laughed and returned to sipping our tea, as excited as any of the characters in Alice and Dobson's pre-pubescent Wonderland, putting aside again the fact that we were actually documenting the world in which we found ourselves that day, not just playing around. Someday the errant Oriental's young daughters will discover our documents buried deep within some museum-like cyber cave of the future, or perhaps part of a history of photography class at the university. Someday those very same daughters will park in the lot, not to visit the Fertility Clinic for stimulation, but to visit Burkhart Studios for directions to their own fertile delta.

In the meantime, an employee of the new Comedy Sports Theater came out her car and spied us sitting there, leisurely sipping our tea. She was amused and in awe, but able to speak: "How wonderful and strange it is to see you here in the middle of our parking lot -- how out of the ordinary!"

Burkhart quickly brought her to her senses: "My dear, it is you that is out of the ordinary -- your parking lot so heavy laden here in the middle of our oasis, our living theater!"