My best friend Kate and I were 12 years old, and we were getting ready to do some aerobics with Jane Fonda. I had on pink spandex and a velour sweat top and Kate was wearing a blue unitard. Both of us had pulled our hair into tight side ponytails. We went into my parents’ room to find an aerobics video.

Standing in front of my mother’s bureau, I read aloud the titles of her vast collection of exercise videos. When I said “Abs, Buns and Thighs Featuring Jane Fonda,” Kate asked to see the cover. Jane Fonda was wearing an awful salmon-colored thong leotard over nylon tights. We agreed on the video and assumed our positions in front of the TV.

When I popped it in and pressed play, a buxom woman who resembled one of Charlie’s Angels was bent over naked in the center of the screen. She had bleach-blond hair and breasts the size of cantaloupes. Her mate was standing behind her with a rope of sausages, and he was pulling them out of her butt.

I gripped the two-pound weights in my hands and looked over at Kate. She stepped closer to the screen and we started laughing hysterically. Kate crossed her legs so she wouldn’t pee her pants. When our laughter settled, we became fixated on the TV.

Our heads bent to follow the camera as it focused on the back end of the blonde. I couldn’t believe the robust man standing behind her was pulling my favorite food out of her butt. After what seemed like five minutes, he was still pulling sausages from her derriere.

The thoughts accumulating in my head were hard to verbalize to Kate. She seemed so excited to watch our accidental discovery that I decided to keep my worries about the porn we had stumbled upon to myself.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen sex. My mom had let me watch Shakespeare In Love, which had a few sex scenes, but nothing like this. Maybe my sex education teacher had just skipped the chapter on foods used for foreplay. Was this normal sex? My ignorance made me feel anxious. I dropped my weights and ran to the kitchen for answers.

My mother was in the laundry room, laughing with her friend on the phone, when I asked, “What is that video you have of a man pulling sausage links from that woman’s butt?” In her loud, dramatic Philly accent, she said, “Oh my God,” and hung up the phone. I could tell my mother was nervous, because she wasn’t making eye contact with me. She giggled a little and muttered a response I didn’t believe. “It’s your grandfather’s,” she said. “And why are you snooping through my stuff?”

I explained to her that the video in the Abs, Buns and Thighs case was not the workout VHS we intended to watch. My mom started blushing and rushed to her room.

Kate was seated on the bed still hypnotized. Mom ejected the tape and repeated again that it belonged to my grandpa.

After Kate left, my mom told me the truth. We went into the laundry room and she explained to me that her friend had given it to her as a joke. I relaxed on a pile of clothes while she folded laundry and casually answered my questions about sex. My mom told me that porn wasn’t something she personally enjoyed, but that some people watch it to help their romantic relationships. I asked her if sausages were something people used during sex. She laughed and explained that some people have weird fetishes, but sausages are not normally used during sex.

As the conversation continued, I felt at ease asking my mom questions. I sat deep in the pile of clothes and asked about the blonde’s breasts. Were they fake? Struggling to untangle some aprons, my mom said they had to be breast implants because they were too big for the woman’s body.

Our chat in the laundry room wasn’t an in-depth conversation about sex, but my mom made feel comfortable just talking. I’ll always remember sitting in the laundry room, laughing at her casual responses to my questions about her ‘70s porn. To this day, I can’t look at my mom’s workout videos without remembering this story. And I can’t eat sausages without thinking about them being removed from that blonde’s butt.