Our Hosts for the Evening: Patrick and Fitzsimmons Do It With Flair

LAS VEGAS — In a modest dressing room along the winding corridors backstage at the Mandalay Bay Events Center just minutes before the start of the 25th Anniversary AVN Awards Saturday night, a cool and collected Greg Fitzsimmons, preparing to do his sophomore stint as co-host, told AVN he felt "a little nervous," but good.

Then it was to the stage, where he launched into a just-the-right-length opening monologue that had the crowd roaring like rarely seen in the quarter century prior at AVN's yearly little ceremony.

Starting off with some pointed cracks on a topic that served almost as a thematic thread for the night, Fitzsimmons exclaimed, "The Christian right wants us to be ashamed of our orgasms, and we're here to say fuckin' boo! I want to one day jerk off on a bus and when I'm done, have someone say to me, 'God bless you.'"

In another, non-political but just as choice zinger, he riffed, "Nobody gives me a better handjob than myself. And if any of you girls out there think you can do a better job, I challenge you to come try backstage after the show. You can cheat! You can use your mouth, you vagina, your asshole, whatever."

When Fitzsimmons brought co-host Tera Patrick out for her own quick monologue, she offered, "I want to start the night off by being the first person to congratulate AVN on the 25th anniversary of these awards that celebrate our right to watch what we choose to watch in the privacy of our own homes."

Following the show, as Patrick and Fitzsimmons entered the pressroom, Fitzsimmons loudly announced, "OK, everybody ... don't ignore Tera!"

We did not, of course, and asking for her immediate feelings on hosting the milestone event, Tera told AVN, "I think it was an amazing show, I had a great time doing it, and I would love to it again someday. It was really a lot of fun. I felt like the show went great, we moved it along really quick, and everything was right on the mark. I did my opening, and that was the hardest part, and then after that, it was smooth sailing from there."

She added that she was really happy to have picked up the Best Interactive DVD trophy for the Teravision/Hustler Video co-production InTERActive, which the one and only Larry Flynt accepted alongside her. (This was the only category in which there was a tie, the honor being shared by Zero Tolerance Entertainment's Interactive Sex With Jenna Haze.)

For his part, Fitzsimmons said of this second go-around presiding over the AVN Awards, "I guess you feel a little bit like I lost my virginity two years ago here, and now I came back and I feel like I fucked just a dead old whore.

"And it's even more fun, you realize," he went on. "The virgin stuff's for the birds; this is like I knew my way around, I knew the whole crowd better. It really is a tight community of people, and it's nice to have gotten to know them two years ago and stayed in touch with a lot of them, and met some great new people like Belladonna, who's really great, just a great person. And Jesse Jane was here, who hosted with me two years ago, and I've kind of kept in touch with her, it was good to see her again. So it's like, I feel very welcomed by this community, and I have a lot of respect for how hard they work and how brave they are with all the civil liberties being stripped away, and censorship, and I think it's important that this is growing every year.

Fitzsimmons' first time hosting was also the show's last in the Grand Ballroom of the Venetian Hotel, and on the difference between that venue and the much larger Mandalay Bay Events Center, he said, "Having all those people up in the balcony was great, 'cause the energy started from the back of the room and came forward. The worst crowd in the world are the actual porn stars, 'cause they're sitting up front and they're trying to show their beaver to the camera, and some asshole in a yellow suit was up there I almost strangled, but ... I like it — bigger the better, let's keep going bigger."

And with that, Fitzsimmons said, he was off "either to have sex with my wife, or my balls are going to audition for the Blue Man Group."