How “REAL” you like the DRAMA to be?

Role Play lives under my Dark Chocolate menu, tucked between the straightforward and the slightly unhinged. The requests usually arrive by text, often phrased like classified ads: Can we do Nurse scenario? or Teacher / student – interested? I always ask questions, because “nurse fantasy” could mean anything from Florence Nightingale to a woman in latex who definitely didn’t pass her medical boards. Bingo! Most followed up with three-page scripts.

Others with 2 words:

“Surprise me.”

I still ask them: How deep do you want to go? Do we start the moment you walk in, or do we hug or shake hands first like civilised adults before I tell you to bend over? The fantasy only works when both of us know exactly where it starts and ends.

Todays’s booking arrived with detail. He wanted “Librarian”: tension, control, a slow-building scenario where power tilted like a seesaw. We refined it over days, line by line, workshopping the beats like two playwrights with questionable morals. By the time he knocked, we both knew our marks.I prefer skipping the polite greetings. It ruins the spell when I open the door in character and he says, “How was your weekend?”

Sir, I am currently a strict librarian holding overdue fines over your head. We don’t have weekends, so I step straight into fiction. One look and the game changes. I improvise, a sharp stare, a stern voice, the perfect amount of wide-eyed annoy. Every detail deliberate. For the brief moment, even I believe it. The scene builds, holds, and releases exactly as we planned. Only after, when his pulse settles and the room comes back into focus – do we drop the act. Laughter breaks through like applause at a one-act play nobody else will ever see.

If realism ever earned awards, I’d need a bigger shelf.

Here’s what role play actually does: it makes fiction feel just real enough that your body forgets to fact-check. Push too far and it shatters. Hold back too much and it never catches fire. The craft lives in the balance, danger and safety breathing the same air, both of us pretending we are not pretending.

Last week the city turned into a costume party. Sexy vampiress, naughty teachers, women and old teenagers in lace corsets and latex they’d never wear on a Tuesday. Halloween makes fantasy socially acceptable for exactly one week. I do it year-round, and nobody calls it festive.

The costumes were identical to mine: same fishnets, same too-short hemlines, same wink at propriety. The difference? On Halloween it’s creative expression. On Wednesday at 2 p.m. it’s work. Same polyester, different moral panic.

Halloween gives everyone permission to play dress-up, to try on another identity, test an edge, explore a fantasy without consequence. Their costumes go back in plastic bags by Monday. Mine stays hanging, waiting for the next booking.The only difference is I’m honest about what I’m selling.

And speaking of nurses: When someone texts Nurse scenario, they do not mean the exhausted shift worker in orthopaedic shoes. They mean the fantasy nurse: latex gloves that squeak, a white mini-dress with a red cross too tight to zip all the way up, white thigh-high stockings with a seam up the back, and heels no hospital would insure. The costume does eighty percent of the work. I just have to remember not to trip while taking someone’s “temperature.”

A real nurse would laugh you out of ICU. But that isn’t the point. They’re after recognition, not realism, an image burned into their brain from a lifetime of soft-core DVD covers or late-night Pornhub spirals.

The same goes for teacher fantasies. A real teacher wears coffee stains and the faint scent of dry-erase markers. The fantasy one wears a pencil skirt, glasses that slide down just enough, and a voice that drops low when she says “detention!”.

Both hold authority. Only one is designed to make you hard.

The costumes matter, but not because they’re convincing. They signal that the game has begun. The moment I zip up that nurse dress or adjust those glasses, we’re both agreeing to the fiction. He’s no longer a marketing manager from the CBD. I’m no longer texting deposit instructions. We’re in the story now.

I own 2 nurse outfits, 2 school-girl uniforms (one disturbingly accurate, one openly ridiculous) and a blazer reserved for “boss who needs disciplining” scenarios. None are realistic. All work.

And here’s the trick: they have to come off at exactly the right moment. Too early and you kill the fantasy. Too late and you’re fumbling with a zipper while he’s already finished. By the time we’re both sticky and satisfied, that latex nurse dress is a crumpled pile in the corner, looking exactly as ridiculous as it deserves to.

My space is not a hospital or a classroom or a stage set. It doesn’t need to be. A softly delivered phrase carries more weight than a closet full of riding crops and rulers.

Realism is irrelevant. Believability is everything.

I’ve had men arrive with scenarios typed out, bullet-pointed, sometimes laminated. One handed me dialogue with stage directions: (She crosses to the desk. Pause. She turns sharply.)

Sir, this is a blow-job, not a one-act play. But I appreciate the effort.

Another requested “angry ex-girlfriend who is also a cop.” I asked, “Do you want me to arrest you or yell at you?” He said, “Both.” So I improvised, badge, handcuffs, and twenty minutes of very convincing fury about how he never texted back. It was Oscar-worthy and utterly absurd. When we finished, he grinned and said, “That felt real.” I poured him water and thought: That is the entire point. These roles: the nurse, the teacher, the neighbour, the stranger, are not clichés. They’re doorways. They let people test edges without falling off cliffs, explore control and vulnerability without consequence.

Role play works because it holds truth and fiction in the same breath.You show who you are by pretending to be someone else. The costume is never the goal. It’s the excuse the scene needed.

When the session ends and he steps back into his clothes: jeans, business shirt, the uniform of a regular Wednesday, the atmosphere cools. The world outside starts knocking again. They always thank me for “getting it.”

For not laughing. For holding the frame even when it teetered.

I never tell them the secret: that I was laughing the whole time.

Not at them. With them.

At the beautiful absurdity of two adults playing make-believe with surgical precision and no audience but ourselves.

Because role play is serious business. But it’s also ridiculous. And that’s what makes it perfect.

I give them the costume, the excuse, the prop, the invitation made of polyester and optimism. They bring the courage to step into it. And somewhere between the zipper going up and the zipper coming down, we both land somewhere honest.

Even if we’re pretending the whole time.