Sara Tucker's Blog, page 9

Christmas with the In-laws

Christmas with my French in-laws in Issey-les-Moulineaux, Paris, France. The dictation is a letter from Pere Noël to Mathilde, to be read before opening her presents.

My sister-in-law, Hélène, in her kitchen.
Shucking oysters: Hélène, Marc, Patrick.
The lights are a reflection: This photo was taken through the window as I stood in the garden.
Opening the gifts from Pere Noël.
A tiny portion of our vast seafood dinner.

How Long Is a Gorilla’s Penis When Fully Erect

The ditto machine, an early copier. A little before my time.Once upon a time, before Wikipedia allowed us to research delicate matters with discretion, a Cosmo fact checker was given a manuscript entitled "That Marvelous Male Member." The assignment: to verify every factual item in the 1,500-word article. Now, when this fact checker, who happened to be a rookie (less than a week on the job), got to the part about the astonishing length of an adult gorilla’s erect penis, he called the Bronx Zoo and asked to speak with a primatologist. After a long, painful introduction (“I work at Cosmo and I’m checking this article and I know it sounds crazy but . . .”) the checker could procrastinate no longer. Out popped the question. “Four centimeters,” said the zoo guy without hesitation. As if he got asked this question every day. “That’s one-point-five inches,” he added helpfully. The researcher, my friend Steve, remembers this incident as if it was yesterday. The primatologist’s answer, 1.5 inches, was of course correct—a gorilla’s penis is astonishingly puny. Steve reminded me, however, that despite everything he went through to get this detail right, the magazine got it wrong. Apparently, some incredulous copy editor, stunned that Mother Nature had dealt the gentle giant such a low blow, changed “length” to “width” and “erect” to “flaccid.” I was reminded of this incident during a recent Facebook discussion of The Way We Worked, now showing at AVA Gallery in Lebanon. Many thanks to my friend Lori Flint for her mention of microfiche, which launched a flood of memories. In my next post I will tell you about the Kensington Ladies Erotica Society, a romance with Simba the ape, and my brief career as a sex expert for the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky.