Lux Alptraum and the Wonderful World of Boning

By carolinianweb on January 27, 2016 • ( 0 )

Mary Windsor
Staff Writer

Geeksboro Coffeehouse Cinema hosted Lux Alptraum last week as she performed her live sex-education comedy show, “The Wonderful World of Boning.” “The Wonderful World of Boning” has been performed in many theaters and clubs around the country. Alptraum explained the concept as “sex ed with a sense of humor.”

Joe Scott, owner and creator of Geeksboro, opened the show with his own anecdotal experience when it came to sex education growing up. He explained that he grew up in a small town and his parents were Latter-day Saints. Scott’s father was extremely against sex-education and forced him to opt-out of the classes given by his school system.

Scott introduced Alptraum before announcing, “I’m ready to finally see the fucking.”

Alptraum’s comedy show involved not only herself but also a co-host, Sharon Paul, who helped with hilarious commentary as they presented VHS videos that were filmed during the ‘80s and ‘90s. Most of the videos were poorly filmed and acted by high school students in New York. Sharon Paul is from NYC and is a public school sex education expert and proudly proclaimed she once wrote an eight page paper on chlamydia.

Unlike Scott’s conservative upbringing, Alptraum’s life has always been open and involved thorough sex education through her parents. Her mother was an HIV educator in Buffalo and Alptraum began volunteering at the Red Cross, doing HIV peer education through theater when she was in high school.

Though this was her first introduction to sex education, throughout the past two decades Alptraum has explored sex education and worked in the field of sexuality in a variety of ways including freelance writing, working with teenagers and pregnancy prevention programs, volunteering as an HIV pre-test counselor and many other things.

“I’ve always been a performer and enjoyed comedy,” Alptraum said. “A couple years ago I combined both of my interests and took some sex-ed films I had from previous jobs and created ‘The Wonderful World of Boning.’”

The comedy show, however, is not one for education purposes. Alptraum uses comedy to talk about difficult topics and sex is one of them. “I think that injecting comedy when talking about sex education and sex makes it easier for people to open up and talk about their experiences and ask questions,” she explained.

Sex education has always been important to Alptraum, as she saw her mom work as an educator and she grew up in the ‘90s, when HIV was a frequently discussed topic.

“It really helped seeing what my mom was doing and how she educated people about HIV and worked to reduce stigma about those who had HIV. Many people didn’t want to befriend, work with and touch people with HIV in fear of getting it and that’s just not how it works.”

Seeing her mother’s influence on young adults that were living and working in a world of AIDS, Alptraum realized that this was an important topic to focus on. As she has grown older, she has seen that sexuality is a really significant part of life and is one that people are often not comfortable talking about.

“Anything you can do to make people more comfortable and open is really important and encourages people’s lives,” she said.

Alptraum attended Columbia University and majored in urban studies. She is the founder of “Boinkology,” a blog about sex and culture. She also ran a blog called “Fleshbot,” which was about the porn industry and adult sex education, for many years. After many affairs dealing with sexuality, Alptraum considers herself now to be a freelance writer and comedian while dealing with many projects on the side.

“The Wonderful World of Boning,” is one of them. This show was an interactive performance between audience members and performers in which a short film on sex education would be showed while Alptraum and Paul would point out awkward situations, horrible acting and add commentary as the films played out, bouncing dialogue off of each other.

The two films showed during the performance were made and produced by two rival high schools in New York during the ‘80s and ‘90s and explored the topics of pregnancy, STDs and different ways of explaining sex and self-pleasure to students.

Lux Alptraum has performed “The Wonderful World of Boning” in cities including Chapel Hill and NYC.