The picture is the parking lot out front of “The

Pleasure Chest.”

 When “The Pleasure Chest” moved their Chicago store to our neighborhood a few years ago, the brigades of young mothers pushing $1,000 strollers were not amused.

Then there were those of us who were a little amused.

The store is not new. The Pleasure Chest first took the brown paper wrapper off the front windows of a store selling sex toys way back in 1971 in the West Village of New York City.

An LA store opened in 1975. A Chicago store at another location in 1977.  Today the nephew of the founder is still involved in running the stores.

The idea has always been the same. An open, honest, fun and healthy sex life. Today grandparents shop the store.

Our neighborhood is one of immense diversity. A local trend in this time of slowed construction and declining income for most of us, is for the richest of the rich to buy the house next to them, tear it down and turn the empty lot into a hockey rink, fish pond, volleyball court or baseball diamond for the kids.

At the same time, there are neighbors lining up at the Food Pantries for their only hot meal of the day. Neighbors who used to be accountants or lawyers, who used to have a home and a car and a known future.

There are the walking wounded who have slipped entirely through the fraying social safety net as it hangs only by the thinnest of threads. Never really sure where they will eat or sleep next.

So the Pleasure Chest really ---as it turns out—didn’t change morality, end marriages, beckon to the four horseman of the apocalypse to giddy up down Lincoln Avenue and flash their swords of righteousness. Neither Michelle nor husband Marcus Bachman needed to be called in to consult. The war on women did not open up a new front right down the block from the Dunkin Donuts.

Instead, The Pleasure Chest just keeps on doing what it has been doing since the early seventies. And doing it well. No one’s morality changed. People had much larger battles to wage.

The Pleasure Chest is a store. Like lots of stores.

Of course the school bus in the parking lot of The Pleasure Chest on a Sunday afternoon. The picture you see here?

Many of us found most amusing.

Photo Credit: E. Moeller-Younger