We’ve all been to magical places. Lands and times that while we’re in them allow us to deny the urges that make us lame.

As a youngster one such place was a hunting cabin in the Catskills where I saw my first Playboy. My buddies and I flipped through the best and worst pictorials of 1988 without fear, because we were fairly certain that a nun’s power to see and hear all – which kept (keeps) us St. Paul’s kids leashed in like an invisible fence – could not penetrate a mountain shed in the outer reaches of Delaware County.

As an adult, another happened to be some guy’s lawn on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where a pretty girl complimented my hand sewn Mardi Gras cape. “Aren’t you a pretty little princess?” she said. And for a few hours, by God, I was.