I’ve been on a date with Natalie Krinsky for 10 minutes, and she hasn’t had sex with me once yet. I’m talking nothing. She didn’t stick her tongue down my throat when we met outside the restaurant, she didn’t spank me when I got up to go to the bathroom, she hasn’t even LOOKED my crotch. What kind of a sex fiend is she?

I’ve been putting out the vibe since we sat down at our corner table at the Istanbul Cafe — buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt, winking constantly, licking my unshaven upper lip– and she’s a brick wall. Excluding the time I made out with my cousin at a bar mitzvah, this is the worst date I’ve ever been on.

Dead silence. I distract myself by eavesdropping on the mini-crisis taking place to our right, where a group of older women are trying to fit into a romantically cramped booth. They nearly make it, too — but then their extremely large cohort enters from stage left, and throws off the physics of the whole thing. Disappointed, they pick up their purses, curse the fat lady, and pick a larger, less exotic table.

I laugh. Natalie slaps me. And not in the good, sexy way.

This is now officially worse than tonguing down Rachel Louise Yolen, my second cousin from New Pontz.

An equally prudish waitress, who makes not a single pass at me the entire evening, takes our order. Finally, conversation flows.

Natalie, it turns out, is Canadian. She’s from a tiny town called Sasquatch or something, somewhere in the tundra. She was so bored as a child that she took to writing cute little sex columns that only she and her family would read, publishing them in the Frenglish biweekly “Krinsky Family Gazette.” A frivolous affair at first, the paper soon blew up (figuratively), itself making headlines when intrepid young sex reporter Natalie cracked open the story that had Canada buzzing for weeks: “Doing It Is Awesome!”

Natalie, now age 14, had unknowingly sparked the flame of the Canadian sexual revolution. Up until this point, Canadian babies had been grown on “baby trees,” — only now, with Natalie’s in-depth explanation of the multifaceted coolness of intercourse, did Canadians catch on to the craze that had been sweeping the world since the big bang: procreation. The Meiosis Mambo.

The Canadian population blew up (figuratively). “It” was the IT thing to do. If you weren’t doing “it,” you were a nobody in the north. Hockey arenas cleared out. Maple syrup factories shut down for weeks. Baby orchards closed permanently, the land sold off to sharecroppers. The “it” age had begun. And the controversy began to swirl (figuratively) around Canada’s newest cause celebre, Natalie (No Middle Name) Krin–

Oh GOOD! The food’s here! I can stop pretending to listen, and preoccupy myself with the appetizers. I’m handed a plate of gorgeous calamari. If these were any fresher, they’d climb off the plate and into Natalie’s blouse– at least then, SOMEBODY would be getting some “it.”

Natalie, with a full mouth, continues her tale.

In the furor encircling Natalie’s fame, the Krinsky family pulled up stakes and moved to New York City, piling everything they owned (mostly pornography) into an ancient roadster, a la “The Grapes of Wrath” or “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The Krinskys reached the Big Apple in six months, and squatted in an abandoned apartment on the Upper East Side, where they live to this day.

Natalie Krinsky does not seek out fame. Fame, even if it is in a vacuum — be that Canada or Yale — follows her around. Though what she says is admittedly never particularly groundbreaking, the gusto with which she says it brings her fortune. This girl didn’t invent sex. She just writes a column about it, and does it (and “it”) well. And while she is thankful for all that this new whirlwind has blown her way, she can’t help but be hesitant about the whole thing. Wouldn’t you be just a little dubious of a celebrity based around the fallacious notion that you taught Adam and Eve how to perform oral sex?

I would be. I don’t even believe in oral sex. For that matter, I don’t believe in Adam and Eve.

Natalie Krinsky is no sex goddess. She’s just a sweet Canuck looking for a good time, who, like me, lucked into getting her own spot in the paper.

By this point in the meal, as the deep fry batter settles in my stomach, I’ve given up my game. Besides the obvious flaming hotness of the girl, I was really only out to sleep with her for the ends of my own fame– me being one of the silent majority not trailed by God-given celebrity. Maybe I would be so good, I thought, that she would write a column about me. More likely, though, I would be so BAD, she would see it as her duty to write a column warning the rest of her breed about me and my notoriously awkward thrusts.

There is no room for me in Natalie’s pants, and it’s probably all for the best. I realize I’m having too nice a time with her to want to ruin it with a terrible hookup. This is a wonderful girl. This is the kind of girl you want to bring home to meet your parents.

The meal comes to a close as Nat and I order Turkish coffee — which is to regular coffee what a bullet is to a softball: smaller, harder, more deadly. To cap off the evening, Natalie insists that we read our fortunes in the sludge that’s gathered on the bottoms of our tiny Turkish cups.

We turn the cups upside-down, letting the sludge paint their insides with images of the future. After a few minutes, we lift the cups and inspect the dried sediment inside.

Natalie’s cup has what looks, unmistakably, like an enormous phallus — perfectly circumcised, replete with a fine set of testicles. I KID YOU NOT. This girl does not seek out sex. Sex follows her around. God bless her.

My future is less clear than Natalie’s. This much I could have told you before reading the sludge. When I lift up my cup and look inside, I see shapes that vaguely resemble (in no order) a three-legged horse, the continent of Africa, and what looks like a sideburn.

That’s going to be some freaky sex. Bring it on, future man.

Greg Yolen ’04 has size 16 feet and a mean jump shot.