A preview of Second Life's first holodeck, a little more on race and avatars-- and a very strange phone call interrupts a hot date. Meanwhile, be sure to secure a copy of Ellen Ullman's The Bug, and begin reading in earnest, in anticipation for her in-world appearance on the 19th.

Before Marilyn Murphy begins her dance routine, I beg her to keep the act PG-13, so as not to scandalize the Lindens-- or even worse, my real life girlfriend.

"Now let's be crystal clear here," she says, "we are [only] talking about animated pixels."

"Well yes," I say, "but there are subtleties involved!"

So Marilyn complies. And as the music kicks in, she unleashes a dazzling-but-relatively-demure flurry of athletic dance moves, karate kicks, and assorted bursts of pantomimed sass, all perfectly timed to the swooping, driving beat of a pounding electronica track. It's the first dance routine I've seen that looks like something other than the generic moves available in the default avatar gesture menu-- in other words, to look like actual, professional choreography.

"I hate scripted dancing," she says, after the song plays out and the applause from the audience gathered at Club Vogue dies down, "won't touch it. I memorize hot keys, and adapt as I screw up… I practice with a song [beforehand], and try to work with the beat."

In addition to performing in it, Marilyn also owns the Vogue, and believes it to be the only successful enterprise of its kind. Before building it, she danced at another club, and while she made money there, the property itself, like so many others like, went belly up.

"And I watched it fail," says Marilyn, "and I learned from it. The reason is, the guy who owns one-- a guy-- has to pay for the building and the land. So he has two choices: a large door charge, or take it from the girls who work there. Now, that don't work either way you try it-- so I built this." She was helped in this by fellow group member Siobhan Taylor, "Who assisted me emotionally and financially to remain in the game, and to Construct Club Vogue.

Now, she continues, "I own the land and everything you see, and I pay for it by dancing, and the girls who work here pay me nothing. I support the club totally from my dancing, and the girls keep all the money they make. How can a man own the club and show a profit?"

"I guess a guy with a hot babe avatar could do it," I suggest.

"I guess," she says, unconvinced. "My experience lets me work with guys much better. The other girls who actually become dancers here are too shy sometimes to cajole a guy into the deal. I can do it, and then turn them over to another girl."

Second Life is Marilyn's very first foray into the world of MMOGs. "My husband plays these games... some Camelot thing and some World War Two thing. He thinks this is for uh....well, not his type. And he showed this to me and he said he thought I could go shopping here-- and I said 'SHOPPING???!!!!'" And when it came time for her to start a business and bring in an income, Club Vogue was the ultimate outcome. And while she's not sure she'd like him to join her in SL, she says her husband's quite proud of the enterprise she runs in here. "I am proud of me," she adds.

I point out that much of the mature-rated content in Second Life seems to be developed by our women players. "Which," I say, "may seem counter-intuitive to many."

"I don't think it's so counter intuitive," says Aesendria Serpentine, a scantily-dressed brunette sitting nearby pipes up. "The anonymity allows you to do things you wouldn't otherwise do. But want to. In real life, I wouldn't be laying around in the nude, or even be in a strip club, in fact I still wont, but [in] here it doesn't seem to matter."

"Club Vogue is also a group," says Marilyn, "it's female only." At 48 members, it's one of the largest-- and only four of its members are in-world dancers. "And most groups may have a theme," she continues, "but I have tried to make the Club Vogue group actually mean something. We help newer girls who come in game with their avatars, and money and advice. So we try to act as a sorority sort of."

The social fabric unraveled, the deficits were too high to hold it together, and in the end, all the great American icons came crashing down, and were quickly forgotten.

That could be the summary for what's happened in Blue, the home simulator for the Americana group. Over the year, they'd developed the place into a nostalgic microcosm of the United States, with a Route 66 highway, a Washington monument, a Hollywood soundstage, and many other indelible landmarks. In recent weeks, however, all of it simply began disappearing. When I visited last week, little trace of Americana remained, but for the Washington monument-- and next to it, a tombstone, commemorating its passing. In that time, the buildings and monuments had been de-rezzed, the underlying land returned to the open market. And it wasn't just nostalgic icons that had gone; missing too was the memorial to 9/11, a memento to very real, very raw emotions.

The end neared, according to some, when Americana's founder unexpectedly left Second Life a few months ago. Ironically-- or not, depending on your point of view-- his in-game name was George Busch.

"George was the heart and soul of Americana," says group officer Alexis Fairchild, "and it hurt us terribly when he left. We tried to push on, but I think that those who were there from the very beginning, including myself, never fully recovered from his leaving."

After their leader departed, they were also beset by the tax burden that maintaining such an ambitious public works project entailed. "The financial burden of not only supporting the land tax of an entire sim, let alone the object tax of all of the Americana builds, was far too much for the eight [active] members to bear," says fellow officer Bonecrusher Slate. To protest this tax, some even resorted to a notorious tax revolt, which did bring the problem to the Lindens' attention, but evidently too late to preserve Americana.

They were hoping that version 1.1, which reorganized the tax structure and introduced group ownership rights, would allow them to sustain the theme. But by the time it arrived in mid-October, group attrition had already passed the tipping point.

Then again, it's not like the Americana buildings disappeared from the servers entirely; most of them were disassembled and stored in members' personal inventory. "I personally have over 20 chunks of Fenway Park [in my pocket] that I would have to re-assemble upon a re-rez," says Bonecrusher. And Sinclair Valen plans to return his 9/11 memorial to the world, when he can find the right new location: "I don't want to move it repeatedly, so I don't anticipate it's reappearance for another week or so, until I get a location ironed out."

Meantime, many of the group members continue to socialize, and work on other projects, and some have considered returning Americana to world in full, now that they have 1.1 to use as their collective tool. "Honestly, on paper it sounds like a good idea," say Bonecrusher. "But so many of us sank so much time and effort into the group over a long period of time, that it's too soon for us to go back and try again. But who knows? In Second Life, time passes quickly, so before long we may give it another go."

The best Burning Halloween installation at press time was Tiger Crossing's graveyard, featuring thick clouds of mist made possible by the new particle system in version 1.1.

"Took a lot of trial and error to get the fog juuust right," says Tiger. "It doesn't want to stick to the ground, so this hilly land made things difficult. But I love the new particle system... There's SO much that can be done with it." To help it along, he set up several "fog machines" throughout the cemetery, so the eerie mist spewed more evenly.

His cemetery was actually a kind of interactive installation. Clicking open the crypt coffin reveals a magic crystal, which gives you the power to determine the fate of the souls interred beneath the gravestones outside. You leave the crypt and walk through the fog, reading the epitaphs on each headstone, and as you do, two glowing icons appear on either side: one a halo, for sending their souls heaven-ward, one a fiery icon, to consign them to damnation below. The trick is to determine whether the soul deserves salvation or not, based on their content of the epitaph. Such as:

"Tom Smith is dead
and here he lies
Nobody laughs
and nobody cries
Where his soul's gone
or how it fares
Nobody knows
and nobody cares."

I begin sending most souls to Hades just for, well, the hell of it. But then Tiger Crossing mentions that these epitaphs are actually based on real gravestones, and that adds a little somber note to the activity. And good thing the site wasn't entirely ready, when Crossing showed it to me: selecting the wrong fate enrages the ghost interred beneath, and he attacks you, until you escape the graveyard, or die.

After their monster success with Burning Life, the Lindens decided to aim for another success -- with monsters. Situated in Plum and Lime "Burning Halloween" became another tax free, temporary autonomous zone, this time with an emphasis on terror. Construction started on October 27th, and by the day before Halloween, the joint was already jumping with the jitters. To wit: giant statues of famous monsters, a creepy graveyard, Hikaru's Yamamoto's gory psycho lair, and on the more surreal side, Mikey Spades' shrine to a malevolent penguin god. Literary and cinematic references also abounded, from Bonecrusher Slate's tribute to the Bates Motel from Psycho to Ananda Sandgrain's "Shrike Tree". (Though I'm pretty sure Dan Simmons' novel Hyperion, from which it's based, didn't feature an impaled monkey.) Not to be outdone, avatar experts were out in force, as well: Fey Brightwillow made sure to model her alien lady and cat costumes (with Einsman Schlegel), and Baccara Rhodes pitter pattered across the runway in her sensuous cat woman outfit. Friday's events were back-to-back with Hallow's Eve cheer, from pumpkin decoration to haunted tunnel exploration to a séance conducted by Tweke Underhill in the Welsh cemetery.