After the brazen bareness of last night’s naked ride, a handful of dreamy romantics spent some wholesome quality time this afternoon reclining on the grass in the rose gardens of Ladd’s Addition, listening to, and giving, dramatic readings of the “good parts” of romance novels. These were, for reasons I never fully understood, interspersed with quotations from Batman movies, delivered from behind a mask.
The ride is now in its second year, after skipping last year. I joined Tom, Lisa, and Tall Steve, all of whom had participated in the first ride. We were met after the first reading by two more romantics, Melody and Eric, who were cruising around looking for a bike event to hook up with. After the first reading we were met up with “It’s the smell of the roses,” explained ride leader “Tomance,” when asked what makes the event work.
Everyone took their turn reading. Eric did a particularly good job — after a slow start, he got really into his passage, a long one detailing a man’s angry passionate feelings about the woman who had spurned him, yet whom he could not forget.
The novels, all battered paperbacks donated by Tom’s landlord, covered a range of styles and plots. My favorite was Johanna Lindsay’s Keeper of the Heart, which seemed to contain an endless supply of passages suitable for reading out loud — her book contained only highly elliptical, demure language that somehow managed to top all the other, franker novels for extreme smuttiness.
Photo slideshow below: