It takes Sterling, Va. cosmetics salesman Charles McWilliams under an hour in a Crystal City basement to turn into a woman. Beneath Freddie’s Beach Bar, alongside the Kosher salt, lime juice, and nacho cheese, McWilliams sweats and smokes his way into Ophelia Bottoms, the drag persona he’s perfected over the past decade.

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After a day of anal ecstacy pills, dropping the soap, underground marriage, historic sexual assaults, pasties for dinner, and half-naked drag queens (more on that later), let us abandon sex for a moment and return to romance—hand-shaking, sheet-ripping, dog-invoking French romance, courtesy of Jacques Brel. That Mathilde sure must be somethin’.

The wait for dinner at Crystal City Restaurant was nowhere near as painful as it was this afternoon at the Camelot Show Bar. I’m hard-pressed to explain why. It may be because the women weren’t fully nude at CCR. It may be because the women didn’t try to suck up as hard to you at CCR. It may be because I had wireless internet access at CCR.

 Whatever the reason, my $5.99 New York strip steak dinner appeared in short order. Sure, I did have to ask the waitress to break my $10 bill, so I could have a steady supply of singles. CCR has a rather aggressive dancer schedule. No stripper shakes it longer than the length of a single jukebox song. That means they get up there, quickly strip down to pasties and a G-string, perform a number of limber exercises designed to expose the naughty parts of their anatomy, and get the hell off the stage.

And then they come right to your table, where protocol says  you give them at least a buck for wiggling their butt cheeks in rhythm. I felt obligated to pass out dollars even as I was stuffing my face with beef. I felt like Dad at the dinner table passing out money to his daughters.

Read More “My Dinner at Crystal City Restaurant: The World’s Thinnest Strip Steak” »

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Crystal City Restaurant came highly recommended by an hospitality biz insider who’s been known to date a stripper or two. He told me that CCR — as it’s known among the regulars — has a good reputation for serving solid steaks along with its carousel of flesh on two stages.

The place looks rather harmless from the street. It features a brick-and-tile facade that gives little indication, save for the silhouette of two mammothly endowed women, of the nude acrobatics going on inside. Unlike at Camelot Show Bar, where I ate lunch today, you have to seat yourself, which is sort of a pyschological test to measure your perv and shame levels.

I decided that if I’m going to do this thing right, I’m going to sit right up front, by God. I claimed a four-top booth near the stage and plopped myself down. I promptly ignored the dancer about eight feet away and checked my e-mail accounts, typed out an e-mail to a source, checked facebook,  looked for comments on my previous postings, logged on to Twitter, and generally acted like I was at the office for about 10 minutes.

Read More “My Dinner at Crystal City Restaurant: A Bit of Vegas in Arlington” »

This Capitol Hill residence, generally called Fellowship House, produces more sleaze per square foot than any dwelling this town has ever known.

Its tenants  show up on the scandal sheets as sure as USC quarterbacks show up in the NFL.

For more than half a century, the house has been owned and operated by The Family, a secretive clique of right-wing men of the cloth and men of the Congress. Either the structure itself or the landlords suck the righteousness right out of anybody who calls it home.

Only a fraction of what we’ll eventually know about what goes on behind closed doors here has come out yet. But this much is already certain: Show me a recently disgraced Republican, and I’ll show you somebody who did hard time at Fellowship House.

Gov. Mark Sanford? Yup, long before he hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Buenos Aires to have fellowship and hopefully go bang-bang-bang with his soul mate, then-Rep. Sanford was railing righteously about the need to impeach Bill Clinton for sexual relationsish activities.

Read More “Grime Scenes: 133 C Street SE — What the Hell’s Going Down at Fellowship House?” »

A Manchester couple vacationing in Washington D.C. has revealed that the pair will not be smuggling any condoms back with them to England. On a last-minute shopping spree in the CVS Pharmacy in Dupont Circle, the British pair snubbed America’s “most trusted” Trojan condoms, stating “we wouldn’t buy them, because we don’t know the brand.”

According to the couple, most residents of the U.K. prefer Durex-brand condoms.

“They are a hell of a lot cheaper here, and we do try to take a lot of stuff back with us, but we’re definitely not taking these.”

Millions of British tourists flock to the U.S. each year to make the most of bargain prices, but research by Washington City Paper suggests that few will be returning with suitcases full of condoms.

Nobody at Church and Dwight Co., the company behind the Trojan range, was reached for comment.

Its 5 o’clock at Dupont Circle’s CVS pharmacy, and a steady stream of customers begins to arrive.

Two men loiter between the “eye care” and the “vapor relief” sections. They look around. They seem on edge. They’re sizing up the condoms. I understand their distress—confronted with eight shelves of contraceptives, how’s a girl guy to choose these days? “Twisted Pleasure” or “NATURALAMB”?

I decided to make their whole experience a little more embarrassing by conducting some market research of my own.

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What brought Paul Camper and Xiaoming Gao to their courthouse wedding today began with a chance meeting on a Metro Center train platform not more than three months ago.

“We started talking about things we were mutually interested in, like China,” says Camper, who, as a consultant, has worked on Chinese affairs. “It was a very happy circumstance.”

Gao was visiting Washington while preparing for a United Nations conference next month up in New York as part of a large Chinese delegation on youth issues. “I wanted to see the country and visit a few places.” She’ll be visiting a few more spots now. “It was a very productive encounter,” Gao says.

And how: Camper, 59, remembers when he knew he’d have to propose—over dinner at Dupont Circle’s legendary Nora restaurant, “just professing my love for Xiaoming and the difference she’s made in my life.” After realizing their “personal, professional, and spiritual” bond, he proposed soon after over another dinner in Ellicott City, Md.

Read More “Courthouse Wedding No. 4: ‘A Very Productive Encounter’” »

The first decision you have to make at Camelot Show Bar is the same one you have to make at any restaurant, even the ones without naked women dancing on a stage: What do you want to drink? It’s the question that the tall blonde in the skimpy bikini underwear has just put to me. The urge to order alcohol is high. It may be 1 p.m. outside, but deep in the bowels of this dark, clubby M Street NW skin parlor, it feels like it could be 1 a.m. And you’re way behind on your buzz.

But I have an overly developed sense of shame. I can’t look at naked women and drink. So I tell the waitress that I want water.

“Sure, one bottled water,” she says and immediately walks away before I can correct her. Still, sparkling, or tap are apparently not options offered at Camelot. It’s bottled or nothing.

The bikini waitress drops off the smallest bottle of Evian I’ve ever seen, along with a tiny wine glass filled with ice and two straws. I can’t tell exactly from the scribbles on my final bill how much I paid for the water, but it appears to be somewhere in the $6 to $7 neighborhood.

It’s going to be a long lunch.

Read More “My Lunch at Camelot Show Bar: The Jerk Chicken” »