When something’s billed as an evening of “erotic poetry,” you’re pretty much assured it’s going to be either excruciating or a whole lot of fun. The third installment in Studio @620’s eroto-poetry series on Friday night proved to be the latter, big-time. The vibe among the sizable 30something-and-up crowd was sublimely convivial, as in “We’re up for anything but not taking this too seriously” — a mood fostered by suave master of ceremonies Peter Kagemaya, the St. Pete marketing whiz (and Creative Tampa Bay board president) who crafted the eclectic lineup, and by the benignly randy presence of 620 guru Bob Devin-Jones.

It’s hard to pick favorites among the performers; it’s also hard to avoid using words like “hard” without dipping into double-entendre territory, an inevitable destination for many who took the stage. Still, snickery lasciviousness was at a minimum, and, with a few exceptions, embarrassment was avoided (OK, maybe better not to combine bondage and spoken word unless your bondage assistants are really adept at the rope thing). Lots of the material was very funny and some of it was — whaddya know — actually erotic. Which was pretty impressive, considering the fact that several of the performers were putatively respectable civic types — a non-profit administrator here, a city official there.

Among the highlights:

• A TV-cooking-show parody (above) in which Devin-Jones and Katee Tully provided droll advice on how to serve “the perfect penis”

• The Ditch Flowers (recent CL cover boys) singing the lament “Kind, Kind, Kind,” which seemed to be about the difficulty of finding a woman who’s not going to want to beat you up

• The improvisatory wailings of Jeffrey James, who has the debauched-angel thing down pat (and the gorgeous falsetto to match), and partner-in-rhyme Pedro Jarquin

• Tampa Downtown Partnership’s Kimberly Finn exploring a housewifely fantasy (complete with imagined yellow dishwashing gloves) with sinuous Michelle Malott

• Mahaffey Theater Marketing Director Sabrina Anico (left) describing her boyfriend’s charms very convincingly

• A truly hilarious reading from The Big Book of Filth by Nicole Landry, whose sexy-professor persona was the perfect counterpart to the book’s encyclopedic litany of sexual slang

• A mesmerizing take on a Tori Amos song by Teresa Greenlees (whose way with a microphone would be wondrous even if you didn’t know her day job’s at Raymond James)

• The always entertaining Paul Wilborn (Tampa’s creative industries manager) and wife/ singing partner Eugenie Bondurant, who closed the show with some racy Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, a takeout from his recent gig at the Palladium. Wilborn introduced his part of the program with an invitation to the audience to imagine themselves at some fabulous ’20s penthouse party in NYC where interesting folks were doing naughty things in the corners and singing witty songs at the piano — which seemed, on reflection, to be a pretty good description of the party we’d been at all evening.

This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2007.