With COVID-19 hampering everyone’s social life, there seems to be a lot of reminiscing going on. I was reading a news article on Headonism II in Jamacia, which sparked a series of thoughts about the good old days and the fun we used to have before the pandemic.

The last few months have been painful for ourselves and our friends as we try to stay safe. Swingers are a very social lot, and it is a drastic change to avoid parties and get-togethers. In comparison, we’ve both enjoyed living in Las Vegas, a.k.a. Sin City, still it is a significant change from life back in the mid-west.

In some respects, there is not as much to do here as there was back home. Las Vegas Boulevard or “The Strip” is where all of the tourists congregate to gamble, attend shows, drink, and party. Of course, their definition of “party” is different from ours.

Las Vegas has a number of public on-premise party houses, where you show up to a house and party. Here they are basically commercial operations started by couples in the Lifestyle who monetize house parties.

As anyone who’s thrown a party knows, it’s a lot of work and can often be hard on your home and furniture, especially when you have little control over who walks in the door. A couple will decide to start charging a fee to attend as a way of offsetting the expense and aggravation of holding a house party in their home.

There are maybe a half dozen or so places that have house parties regularly in Vegas, but for the most part, we usually avoid them. Once you’re in the Lifestyle for a while and meet other couples, there are always a few who have regular parties. These “house parties” typically have the same people attend, and there are rarely any issues.

Swingers, for the most part, do not drink, and as such, you don’t have drunks to contend with. The ones who cause issues are often new couples that have problems fitting into the activities. There is sometimes an adjustment period for newbies when you discover your other half with someone new.

For us, we’ll generally hit a party with ten to twenty couples given at someone’s house. If the planners do a good job, they will review the guest list to ensure that the attendees get along. Typically, most people are in the same socioeconomic class and share common interests.

Back home, we had a much wider variety of things to do. There were only a handful of people who threw parties regularly, but we also had nudist camps, strip clubs, and it seemed there was often a convention or large gathering of like-minded people.

While Las Vegas is known for its strip clubs but once again, entrepreneurs screwed it up. Back home, our strip clubs were more like a neighborhood bar where the employees take their clothes off. Here the dancers have an ATM with a time clock attached to their waist to keep track of you making it rain.

Previously, a group of ten couples would hit our favorite clubs a couple of times a month. Some of the clubs have couples nights with male dancers for the girls. The atmosphere is low key, and there is not a lot of pressure to separate you from your money.

It’s always seemed odd to me that once you get away from the Las Vegas Strip, the town is very conservative. Back home, we didn’t have the nightlife around the Strip, but in general, the area would be more liberal.

In Vegas, the weather outside is daunting during the summer, which limits outdoor activities. I think today it was 114 degrees F and pretty brutal. We don’t have much in the way of trees, so being outside is somewhat painful during the day.

My wife enjoys lying out at the pool and working on her tan, but here it has to be under the patio to minimize the intensity of the sun’s burning rays. Most homes have high block walls around the backyard, which are helpful to avoid the peeping Toms next door.

While we would occasionally visit a nudist camp, it was not on our regular schedule. Foxy doesn’t like bugs, and I grew up on a farm, so neither of us missed communing with nature au natural. Some of the couples we know are regular attendees, and one club even had small cabins that people built and would go all the time. For us, camping out was always at the Holiday Inn.

Our previous city has a big swinger’s club that has been in operation since the 1970s, and we were lucky to be introduced into the club by one of the first couples we met. They hold large parties, called socials, three or four times a year with sometimes up to two hundred couples attending.

Then there are always the smaller house parties, which are several times a month. We started having an annual New Year’s Eve Pajama Party at our house with fifty to sixty couples. That was always fun but exhausting. Giving a party is a lot of work, especially for two anal people like my wife and me.

Previously, I owned my own business before moving to Sin City, and as such, my time was a lot freer than now when I have to work for a living! We traveled a lot, and our PJ Parties often had five to ten couples from out of state that we had met at clubs across the country. This meant that our Pajama Party would last for up to three or four days, depending on when New Year’s Day fell. People would start showing up at our house a couple of days before the party, and it would last until the next workday.

I’m not sure why I’m thinking about the good old days, except that now it’s stay at home and FaceTime people for excitement. Eventually, we will have a vaccine, and life will return to something resembling normal. I’m not convinced that a Zoom swinger’s party will be like the real thing!

As Las Vegas is a tourist destination, COVID-19 has hit our economy pretty hard. I’m lucky in that my job is not in the entertainment business, and I think I’m relatively safe from getting laid off, but a lot of people are not that lucky.

I’ve noticed several homes in my subdivision that have been abandoned in the last couple of months, and even in a gated community, there is heightened anxiety about security concerns. But we all need to do what we can to ride this out and stay safe.

As a writer of erotica, I’ve ignored the virus in my writing as I feel people need an escape from the day to day problems and just forge ahead as if nothing is wrong. If you need some explicit HEA sex stories to pound your pud, check me out at LarryArcher.blog/stories.

Stay safely six feet apart and wear your mask! See you next month.

XOXO,

Foxy & Larry