"Have you ever kissed Hector before?" I ask her.

"No!" she says, clearly already nervous about it.

"Do you want to kiss him?"

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	"The Art of Kissing" By William Cane St. Martin's Press 180 pages Nonfiction Buy this book
	"The Art of Kissing Book of Questions and Answers: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Perfecting Your Kissing Technique" By William Cane St. Martin's Press 176 pages Nonfiction Buy this book

"No!"

But the show must go on.

By the time the group gets back upstairs, Hector has arrived, as has a guy named Jay. Christian quickly ushers everybody into a nearby dining hall, carrying a purple notebook on which he's written the words "Closed Rehearsal." He has about 45 minutes to teach the students his 30 kisses, each of which is peppered with cheesy gags and the occasional punch line. He runs through the segments at a ferocious speed, barely stopping to explain their meaning, and the students giggle as they awkwardly press their faces together. He wants them to kiss to the beat of music, to act like dentists, to wiggle and writhe, to faux-French-kiss (this is, after all, a no-tongue show).

Christian spends a lot of time telling them what will be funny, and at one point instructs them on how to wait for the audience's laughter to die down before delivering the next punch line. The gags are so corny that I almost cringe, and I wonder what the kissers are thinking. During the vacuum kiss, in which the guys are sucking the breath from the girl in mid-kiss -- the gag being that the girls act like they're being deflated in the chair -- Christian is enthused. "Keep doing it!" he says as he jabs his pointer finger at them. "It's hysterical if you keep doing it."

There are supposed to be four couples rehearsing, but Felix, the guy waiting for his girlfriend, is sitting by himself, miming kisses and looking only slightly sillier than the guys actually kissing girls. Then, unbelievably, a girl from the cafeteria shows up. Christian welcomes her and sits her down next to Felix, who begins to squirm. "She's not my partner!" he says, but Christian doesn't hear him. Amanda does, however, and quickly takes the opportunity to leave her friend Hector and switch with the cafeteria girl.

There are risks involved in putting on a live show based around kissing strangers, and Christian has seen almost everything go wrong. He's seen students freak out, gay and feminist protests, couples get paired up but refuse to kiss, claiming the other is unworthy of their lips. But strangely, the only lawsuit to arise from all this has come from Christian's former girlfriend, with whom he practiced the most bizarre kiss of the presentation: the Trobriand Islands kiss.

This kiss, which is performed during sex, is animalistic, involving a flurry of biting, blood drawing and hair pulling. He found it in an old book about the Pacific islands, and believes it can teach Americans something -- not necessarily due to the violence, but because he says Americans don't kiss during sex as much as many cultures, and therefore people aren't achieving the level of intimacy that they could. After he tried the kiss on his ex-girlfriend, though, she sued him, claiming that her eardrum had been permanently damaged. "I swear to God, my life is a tragedy, and I've turned it into a joke in 'The Art of Kissing,'" Christian says.

Mercifully, Christian has also seen things go right. Audience members regularly ask his advice after the show, and he gets dozens of e-mails every day from people seeking kissing assistance. They're always asking the same few questions, he says: how to French-kiss, how to lean in for a first kiss, how to get rid of hickeys. Some of the people who met on his stage have pursued relationships, and a few even got married. During the rehearsal at UConn, in fact, some sparks seemed to be flying. Three out of the four couples went through the motions with their arms limp and puppetlike, but Nina and Jay, two total strangers, kept their arms tenderly around each other.

I normally hate couples that kiss in public, because I feel as if they're dragging me into their bedroom, imposing their intimacy by creating a private space in a public arena. But here, the couples are so rigid, so completely not in the mood, that they are genuinely funny. This, of course, is what Christian is banking on. It's why he always prefers strangers to real couples, and why he says the best shows are done on the fly. Indeed, when Felix's girlfriend finally shows up, and she joins him in the rehearsal, their bodies are so familiar with each other that I feel dirty watching them.

With the rehearsal over, the group walks toward the ballroom as Christian mutters nervously to himself. They arrive to find 250 students eagerly waiting, and Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel" is blasting from a stereo Christian set up so the audience "feels like they're at a party." The whole thing sort of feels like a train wreck waiting to happen. There's no way those students will remember an hour's worth of rushed cues, and Christian's jokes are simply too childish for a sexually experienced college audience.