For the long first act of my life, as a painfully shy kid growing up in Culver City – steps away from the Sony Pictures studio lot, the iconic Gone With The Wind mansion, which was right by the movie theater downtown, and down the street from the liquor store where they filmed the infamous McLovin scene in Superbad – dating and romance was something I experienced entirely through the silver screen.

I lost count after the first ten, twenty, seventy-five, a thousand. I remember the first time. Driving with my sisters, one of them said, I’ve had sex with a woman. Stunned into revelation, I blurted, so have I. But she was kidding. Entrapment, and I fell for it.