True story.
Guy walks into a sex-toy store. Sees more female flesh than he expected. Flees.
Women were breast-feeding their babies.
Leigh Anne Wilson is nearly bent double as she tells this story, her hearty alto booming out through the Lakeview storefront.
“The poor guy!” she laughs. “Any other time, seeing that many breasts in a sex-toy store would have made for the best Saturday ever!”
Not that nursing infants is a regular activity — anymore — at Wilson’s store, The Honeysuckle Shop, which is nestled among the burrito places and trendy clothing emporiums of North Clark Street.
But it used to be a daily event when Wilson, who opened the shop with her husband in 2002, brought her younger son with her to the store. Which is where she was joined, on that memorable day a year ago, by a couple of other nursing moms.
Not your usual sex-toy store scenario, is it? But for Wilson, a suburban mother of two, it was a moment of sweet vindication.
“So many women come in here and say, ‘I had such a horrible experience at such-and-such store, a creepy guy was following me around.’ It just infuriates me,” she says, her reddish ponytail shaking with disapproval.
Not for her is the nudge-nudge, wink-wink, gag-gift vibe of the typical sex-toy shop. At Honeysuckle, the walls are pale green, the bookshelves are full of poetry as well as such books as “Extended Massive Orgasm,” and more likely than not, Aimee Mann is playing on the stereo.
“We don’t carry the inflatable sheep, the Spanish fly — all that stuff that doesn’t actually work,” she says with a roll of her eyes.
For shoppers who get past the scented lotions, books and poetry and are wondering what a Hitachi Magic Wand actually does, Wilson, a 34-year-old former actress in a funky flowered top and worn jeans, is happy to put down her copy of “Sisterhood Is Universal” to help them sort through the battery-powered devices.
A word of warning, though: On her personal Web log, or blog, (“One Good Thing” at buggydoo.blogspot.com), you’ll find out exactly what Wilson thought of the screechy customer who tried to return used — very used — merchandise (the title of that day’s entry: “`I’m Never Going to Shop at Your Store Again!’ Or, A Gift From God.”). Her reaction to the drunk guy in search of an unprintable sex act.
And her poignant musings on the unhappy 18-year-old Senegalese woman in an arranged marriage who wanted a pill that would make her “like sex.”
When Wilson came to Chicago over a decade ago, it was to make her name as an actress, not a sex-toy purveyor. Even after the shop opened, chronicling what went on there was never part of her master plan. But for a growing online audience, her journal has become a daily must-read, not just because the nature of the store guarantees a steady stream of wacky incidents, but because Wilson’s wicked sense of humor and brutally honest reflections about life as a harried working mom are nothing short of addictive.
Writing the blog entries, which she does mostly on a PC on the store’s countertop, gives her something to do when Honeysuckle browsers don’t need her expertise. After all, she notes, sex toys “are products that pretty much sell themselves.”
Anonymity prevails
Customers described in “One Good Thing” are not identified in any way. Wilson doesn’t mention the shop’s name or even her own last name in the blog — if it weren’t for the Cubs lamentations, you might not know what city she’s in. Still, the characters in these anecdotes are hard to forget.
“I love when she goes into things that go on in the store — when someone is a reluctant shopper, or demanding about what she wants, or a shy guy,” says Christine Cupaiuolo, who writes the column Ms. Musings for Ms. magazine’s Web site. Part of Cupaiuolo’s job is to check out hundreds of blogs, and “One Good Thing” is one of her favorites.
The site “is a testament to the speed of her thought process and her typing — I don’t know if I had two small children and ran a sex shop, how much I’d be getting done every day,” Cupaiuolo says. “The amount and consistency of her writing is amazing.”
“It’s not the same old subject matter — how [Howard] Dean or [President] Bush are doing, a bunch of guys all linking to each other about current events,” says fellow blogger and “One Good Thing” fan Trish Wilson (no relation). “I live in this small town in New England, and you can’t even buy liquor here,” but through Leigh Anne’s blog, Trish Wilson says, she gets to read about what it’s like to be “a normal, married mom who runs a sex shop.”
None of that was part of the plan when Wilson arrived in Chicago. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, the South Carolina native came here in the early ’90s with a (long-departed) playwright boyfriend.
“I have a theater degree, so that means I’m qualified to wait tables and tend bar,” Wilson says over lox and bagels at a cafe near the shop. While working at a series of bars and restaurants, she also acted in various productions, directed a show at TinFish Theatre and became an ensemble member of the female stage-combat troupe Babes with Blades.
Though she acted in a Babes show while she was pregnant with her first son (in one vignette, she re-enacted a fight scene from “Rosemary’s Baby”), she drifted away from theater after his birth four years ago.
Around that time, Wilson and her husband, Steve, who had been selling ads for the Yellow Pages, decided to go into business for themselves.
The multibillion dollar sex industry, Wilson says, “is the only business not affected by a bad economy, so opening the store is a more fiscally conservative choice than you might think.”
The couple’s research revealed Chicago had few, if any, adult toy stores that cater to women, so the Wilsons set out to create a store that would feel welcoming to both soccer moms and “Sex and the City” fans. Honeysuckle opened online two years ago (www.honeysuckleshop.com), and the retail location followed a few months later.
“Women who are a little more conservative aren’t going to want to go into a shop that seems like it caters to a subculture,” says Carissa Szymanski, who, through Honeysuckle, hosts sex-toy parties to raise funds for the Chicago Women’s Health Center. “Men feel comfortable there, too — they don’t feel like they’re the weird man going into the porno store.”
The Wilsons sell no mainstream porn in the store (they do sell “educational videos,” which have tamer packaging and are classified differently under the law). For the store, they picked a subtle name that has “sensual words in it,” as Wilson points out (it also reminds her of the honeysuckle vines of her native South).
The main reason to go with a subtle name, though, was that “you only need to hear that it’s a sex-toy shop once,” Wilson notes.
Not Wilson’s way
Besides, going with the obvious just isn’t Wilson’s style.
The obvious thing to do with customers who are insulting or, shall we say, unrealistic, is to tell them off. But that’s not Wilson’s way. And that’s what the Web site is for, anyhow.
The Internet became a lifeline for her a few years ago, around the time she’d stopped acting and was spending her days with two small children in a far Southwest suburb (she’d prefer not to name the town, a “godforsaken part of the earth” where most of her neighbors don’t know what she and her husband do for a living). She became an avid reader and message-board commenter on various feminist sites, and early last year, with what she insists are minimal Web skills, started her own site.
“I wanted to keep a record of what the kids were like when they were little, true, but I also needed an outlet for the extreme stress that Steve and I have plunged ourselves into with trying to start a new family and a new business at the same time,” she wrote in a recent blog entry about the start of “One Good Thing.”
“I wanted to write to remind myself that even on the [lousiest] of days, there was always one good thing that happened, and if I could just remember what that one good thing was, I could string them all together like Christmas lights and drag that string behind me, occasionally looking back to see how beautiful it all actually was.”
Though One Good Thing soon morphed into Several Funny Things That Happened at the Sex Toy Store, even more memorable than the entry about the pre-teen sex-toy thief or the one about the guilt-ridden Catholic guy who almost couldn’t bring himself to buy an “educational” video (“I won’t go to hell for this, will I?”) are Wilson’s reflections on motherhood.
Watching Wilson tickle her two blond sons as they shriek and giggle and tumble over her on the beat-up couch in her suburban home, it seems hard to believe that on the site, she often nominates herself for “Worst Mother Who Ever Lived.”
“I cannot do this, I don’t have the aptitude for it,” she wrote in one brutally honest entry about a day home alone with the kids. “I always knew I’d be a terrible parent, nobody ever expected me to have kids, so why did I do it?”
Readers respond
“She gets this really big response from the entries she writes about being a mom,” her husband, Steve, says. “There is an isolating feeling that every parent out there has felt — `Am I the only parent going nuts? Am I going to mess this up?’ And she writes in this confiding tone, and people respond to that.”
“When I became a mother, I didn’t suddenly morph into Donna Reed,” says Wilson. “The best thing about the blog is the responses I get. All the mothers comment [about various incidents], `I did that. Don’t feel bad.'”
Though her site is getting noticed on the Internet — it now gets more than 2,000 hits a day, which is quite respectable considering she’s done little to promote the blog and has depended mainly on word of mouth — some of Wilson’s friends don’t even know about it.
Dawn “Sam” Alden, creative director of Babes with Blades, sees it as evidence of Wilson’s “quiet determination” to master something new.
“She hasn’t talked about her writing, I didn’t know about that dimension of her,” Alden says. “She’s not a self-promoter. . . . She doesn’t have that kind of in-your-face presence. But you know that she will advance her dreams.”
Right now, a big dream is to move back to the city in order to cut down on the couple’s lengthy commute to their store. As for other immediate plans, Wilson has just begun monthly column on motherhood (Title: “Because I Said So!”) for Expository Magazine, an online journal.
And beyond that?
“I’d like to open more stores. It’s fun; it’s what I like to do,” Wilson says. “And it’d give me more to write about.”
– – –
Musings from a sex-toy store lady
Excerpts from “One Good Thing” (buggydoo.blogspot.com), Leigh Anne Wilson’s online journal.
Aug. 13, 2003
“A man in his 30’s wandered into the store today. He walked in confidently enough, but as he got further back, he kind of became shy. His eyes rolled over all the [sex] toys. Jennifer walked over to ask if he needed any help. You could tell he was about to say no, then changed his mind and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket.
“It was a copy of the advertisement we put into last week’s alternative newspaper. The caption at the top of the ad read, WHY WOMEN FAKE IT. . . . The caption was highlighted with a yellow marker and underlined twice. . . . He sheepishly told Jennifer, ‘I found this in my wallet.’
“It’s moments like this that make the job worthwhile.”
June 12, 2003
“Yesterday as I zipped out the door to work I saw Steve collapsed on the floor of the dining room, looking like the carcass of a gazelle, with both boys crawling over him like diaper-clad blowflies, and I was very grateful to have a getaway.
Being at the store is much less demanding than mothering a toddler, albeit occasionally much creepier. This dudeish dude walked in yesterday and slowly did a lap around the store, asking my favorite questions, `This is a store for women, huh?’ (Yes.) `So there’s nothing really here for men?’ (We have some items for straight couples) `Can you try out the toys in this back room?’ (You know the answer to this one)
`Heh, guess I’m just a pervert, then, heh heh,’ he said. Way ahead of you there, guy.”
Jan. 10, 2004
“[At parenting class] we recognized one of the women, H. . . . Evidently, she spent her holiday getting a quickie divorce. Most of us chose not to dwell on it past a general clucking of sympathy, but not one of the dads. Also divorced, he launched into a long treatise of how people change so dramatically every 15 years or so that people really couldn’t be expected to stay together longer than that.
“Steve and I have been together 11 years, and aside from being decidedly chunkier than [we] were when [we] were both glamorous nightclub bartenders, we’re essentially the same whiny attention pigs we always were, so I see no reason for this man to go around alarming people, even if his intentions clearly were to make a move on the new divorcee.”
June 14, 2003
“Lately I’ve been mulling over the fact that this one life is all I’ve got. And it’s not a bad life, to tell the truth. But sometimes it sure would be nice if you had an infinite number of chances to experience different things. . . . Most of us just end up settling into a comfortable routine, and the other lives we lead are done vicariously, via books or TV or gossip.
“And I’m not criticizing it. Globetrotting takes its toll, and most of us grew up to see the impracticality of becoming a ballerina cowgirl. And if you have children, the responsible, loving choice is often to put your own life on the back burner to develop the life of your offspring, to a certain extent, anyway.
“Blogs are yet another opportunity to either invite people to live bits of your life with you, or to seek out and live the lives of others.”
June 26, 2003
“I’ve made tons of mistakes with Alex, just tons. I feel like I’m a mean, snarly, wild boar with Alex most of the time. I yell too much, I snap too much, I don’t play enough, I don’t savor enough, I’m too impatient, I’m too fussy, I’m too lazy. I will consider myself a success if he doesn’t grow up to knock over liquor stores.
Christopher has a different mommy, one who never yells, who loves to spend time, who always laughs and smiles and has endless kisses and hugs, who doesn’t sweat the small stuff, who is amused and patient when he clings to my legs, crying while I’m trying to make dinner.
If we had a third one, you’d be able to see me coming from a mile away, from the glow of the halo over my head. If I had ten, I’d ascend directly into heaven, so perfect would be my parenting.”
Jan. 31, 2004
[In a restaurant] I looked over [at] the table next to me. Sitting there was a woman alone, drinking tea and having a cup of soup. Her dark brown hair was curled in those big loose sexy curls that I’ve always wanted to have but my own hair and children have other plans for it, and up in a ponytail it has to be. She was dressed in clean, pressed, fashionable clothes with super cute boots.Over the back of the chair was a pink vintage sixties wool coat. She was slender and toned in the way that I used to be, way back when my jeans were a size four and my kids were in single chromosomal form.
She was peaceful, she was quiet, she could sit there all day long, drinking cup after cup of tea and reading her book.
She could finish up her day with no peanut butter in those curls, no baby poo under her fingernails. I don’t even remember the last time I had a day like that.
I glanced back at her again and was struck this time by the look in her eye. She was staring at Christopher. . . . The look of longing in her eye was so strong it was almost heartbreaking.
She saw me looking at her, composed herself quickly, and offered a smile. “Your children are beautiful,” she said, then said in a rush of forced laughter that said she was kidding even though she wasn’t, not really, “I want your life.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s funny, I was just sitting there wishing I had yours.”
She paused for a second then began to laugh for real.
“Oh, I bet!” she said. “I bet you do! It’s always that way, isn’t it?”
Yeah, I guess it is.
