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A couple of nights ago I heard John Ziegler interview porn legend Ron Jeremy on Los Angeles radio station KFI 640. I didn't listen to very much of the interview, but it did make me think of my senior year in high school. Do I have your attention yet?

Here's a little history for you kids, not long ago "adult" theaters dotted the landscape. Long before Jenna did DVD, and even before VHS became the preferred media for porn, people actually went to theaters and watched porn on film. When I was a teenager The Pussycat Theater chain was synonymous with XXX action. I don't remember how the idea came to us, but one day my best friend and I hatched a brilliant plan to get into a Pussycat Theater just blocks from our high school. The plan was simplicity at its best, or so we thought.

I have a confession dear readers. I'm afraid to say that my friends and I were geeks in high school. We were more than just geeks; we were Navy Junior ROTC (NJROTC) geeks. The strange thing about NJROTC was that many of us enrolled because we were gym dodgers, but most of us went on to enlist in the military after graduation. I'm not sure what made us think that skipping PE in high school would prepare us for the military, but I myself entered USMC basic training less than a week after my high school graduation.

As part of the NJROTC curriculum, we were required to wear a modified naval officer's uniform to school on Fridays. That's where our brainstorm kicked in. My friend and I decided that we would ride our bikes to the local Pussycat Theater after school and lock them up well out of site of the box office. We would remove the NJROTC collar insignia from our uniforms and walk up to the box office looking like a couple of naval officers out for a good time. If all went well, two strapping young men in uniform would dazzle the box office girl and she wouldn't think twice about selling us a pair of tickets.

Surprisingly enough, things went pretty much as planned. We approached the box office, and the ticket seller, who wasn't fooled for a second, looked at us like a couple of jack offs before selling us a pair of tickets. After selling us the tickets, she told us to hurry up and get inside before anybody saw us. I suppose that if she gave us any thought at all, she probably thought that we belonged with the rest of the jack offs watching the movie inside.

Long before Ron Jeremy ever teased Tammy Faye about applying mascara to her false eyelashes, he stared in the first XXX movie my friend and I ever saw. The movie was called Mascara (1982). If I remember correctly, the storyline had something to do with a frigid female reporter who discovers herself while doing an "undercover" story about prostitution, but I could be mistaken. We found our seats, tried to ignore the unpleasant tacky nature of the floor, chased off a couple of guys who sat down behind us after we heard zipper noises, and proceeded to "enjoy" the film.

We dropped the uniform ruse, but visited the Pussycat a couple more times after that first visit. The one thing I remember clearly is that Rom Jeremy was in just about every movie we saw. Fortunately, the years have erased the image of a naked Ron Jeremy from my mind, but I still can't help but chuckle every time I see him on TV, or hear his voice on the radio.