Directly north of Burkhart Studios in the up-scale Lakeview neighborhood, freshly painted yellow stripes delineate the parking lot of Comedy Sports Theater. Primarily intended for evening theater parking, the lot is constantly preyed upon during daylight hours by all sorts of illegal and alien parkers, many of whom are visitors to the Fertility Center on the other side of Burkhart's.

The fertility center used to house the only BMW dealer in town, until Illinois Masonic Hospital offered to trade the car dealer a preferred property in another section of town. Good bye exhaust fumes, hello cloning gases.

On any day but Sunday, I watched a continuous stream of staunch, uptight women (sometimes with their men in tow) file cautiously past the studio in search of the Fertility Center. Envision a modern-day Garden of Eden, with a flood of spermatozoa pushing its tentative wet and winding way through the rusted but still swinging doors of some frigid serpent-shaped fallopian tube. I always felt a little embarrassed for the women, as they passed my studio with their heads bent uncomfortably down.

One of my wizened friends from the street once told me it was really a cloning center. Maybe she was right. When I look around and observe the ever-increasing number of new condos being erected, I can understand there will also be an ever-increasing need for a steady supply of identically programmed occupants to inhabit them.

All of the building blocks are the same nowadays: a Starbucks, a bank or two, a handful of sports bars to further anesthetize the credit bearers.

 

One afternoon in late summer, Robin came over to play and photograph at my studio, and she decided to do it in the back yard. That's right, "why don't we do it in the road!" -- outdoors, under the elms of a 100-year old cottonwood, on a makeshift stage I had built as an extension of my studio/arts community/theater/coffeehouse. 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 you can bet 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 lost souls that still passed the place looking for the neighborhood that used to be there. And it definitely belonged in the back yard of a building that looked a little like Noah's Ark, eternally searching for an olive branch and a safe place to take up roots.

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 an unlikely 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.

I served the tea and sat down opposite the two women, sipping noisily from my own cup. 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 my head. I passed the honey 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 rapid volley of sharp 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."

Upon hearing my voice, her determined gait abruptly came to a halt and was replaced with the 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 assumedly must 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 ahead. Under no circumstance should you divert your 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 to get in 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!"

But of course I couldn't let her go with that: "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!"