Please Open Your Mouth

An invitation to play with your food, your senses, and me. Los Angeles • July 11

Please Open Your Mouth: A Sensory, Sensual Multi-Course Dinner Experience, July 11

On July 11, I'm bringing my long-running immersive dinner experience, Please Open Your Mouth, to Los Angeles for the first time. Before I tell you about it, I want to tell you why I made it (and just a few moments of pleasure it has brought me).

I hold a Medjool date between my teeth while the chef slowly licks a small river of honey from my collarbone. I can feel saliva building around my teeth, and I suck it back. My lips are growing sticky and wet. He drags his tongue into the hollow at the nape of my neck, pressing into the basin before kissing me there. And again under my chin. His teeth graze under my lower lip. I drool, the date continuing to melt. How long can I wait?

Slowly, the chef wraps his lips around the end of the date, sucking on its nub. As he works the hard, sugary skin, he meets my lips and draws the sweetness into him. My teeth break through. There is a burst of freedom as the date finally drops into my mouth, and his tongue enters me.

The reason I love playing with food and the sensuality of eating— with someone else or alone— is the way the attention slows down the moment. The senses come alive in technicolor. A kiss explodes into a symphony. A bite stretches into anticipatory ecstasy.

When we slow down enough to really taste, something unexpected happens. Food stops being fuel and starts becoming play. Curiosity returns. Strangers become collaborators. A single bite becomes flirtation. A dinner table becomes a laboratory for pleasure.

In 2013, my first year in graduate school for playwriting at the University of Texas, Austin, I started writing a theatrical experience I called Please Open Your Mouth. At that point, I was newly adhering to a strict diet to try to cure my migraines, stomach troubles, and severe acid reflux. No dairy, no gluten, to red meat, no coffee, no fried foods, no citrus, no chocolate… The restriction made me desperate for what I couldn’t have. I stayed up at night scrolling pictures of cake on Pinterest like it was porn. I had also struggled for years, like many women, with my own disordered eating— intense counting calories—>restricting—>binging.

I imagined Please Open Your Mouth as a supper club where people could play with food beyond the strictness of health, diet, calories, macros, whatever. Where food could become an instrument of pleasure. Since 2013, I have hosted Please Open Your Mouth dinners in Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, D.C., and New Orleans, each one wildly different, exploring a variety of senses and sensations. Some of my favorite moments include:

• Peanut butter and jelly body painting

• Burying foiled-wrapped baked potatoes in the dirt to dig out with your hands

• Watching strangers exchange numbers and make plans to hang out after feeding each other chocolate cake

Throughout the years, I’ve conducted tons of “research” for the sake of my diners. I’ve eaten a bevy of foods while kissing to see what was fun, what was sexy, and what was gross (my favorite: a small, semi-hard pear I ate with a sexy man in Turkey). I let a hot actor eat prosciutto off my neck, which ended up leading to us having a threesome (prosciutto has that power!).

And across years and states, I've watched strangers become friends, first kisses happen over dessert, and whole new relationships with the act of eating begin to emerge. People tell me years later that they are still thinking about a single bite from one of these dinners.

On July 11, I’m hosting Please Open Your Mouth for the first time in Los Angeles at a gorgeous home in Topanga. This experience is being co-created with professional chef and dominatrix (what a combo!) Ambrosia Wild, who will be preparing the multi-course dinner and also working with me to guide us through eating it. Her dishes are so flavorful, inventive, and locally/organically sourced. We’ll be using ingredients from Eden Forest, the farm we both are connected to, just north of LA.

Imagine a long, low table on a deck in the trees overlooking the canyon. Candles flicker beneath an outdoor chandelier. A waterfall bubbles nearby. Each course is a playful sensory invitation—some delicious, some surprising, all optional. You’ll laugh. You’ll slow down. You’ll probably taste something in a way you never have before.

This isn’t dinner as performance. It’s dinner as permission: permission to linger, to play, to connect, to become fascinated by your own senses again.

People often ask if they need to come with a partner. Absolutely not. In fact, many people come alone.

Everything throughout the evening is guided with clear invitations and easy opt-ins. Every interaction is optional. Some people flirt. Some have deep conversations. Some simply savor incredible food. Some leave having made new friends. Some rediscover a part of themselves they’d forgotten was there.

The point isn’t performance. It’s presence.

If you’ve been craving an evening that feels unlike anything else—where dinner becomes art, strangers become co-conspirators, and pleasure becomes something you can slow down enough to actually notice—I would love to have you there.

Early bird pricing ends tomorrow at midnight, June 30, and because this evening is designed to stay intimate, there are only a handful of seats still available.

Come hungry,
Joanna