Had a date last night … the guy who was taking me out picked me up in the early evening for my first-time ever experiencing WMNF’s annual fundraiser — Tropical Heatwave held in and around the Cuban Club up there in Tampa/Ybor City.

So, the guy picks me up in the early evening, and off we go … road trip!

I’d prepared a written list of questions with which to pummel him on the ride up (yes, I’m a veritable barrel-full of monkeys, a non-stop fun-fest on a date!). I give the guy his props, he gamely answered nearly all of the questions, sidestepping only a few Barbara Wa-wa inanities, like, “Um, if you were a tree …?”

It was raining hippopotamuses on the way up to Tampa. Lightening too. When we arrived in Ybor City, we had to sit tight in his car waiting for the rain to stop. Then mydate said, would you like a drink? Sure, I’m thinking, but going to be a bit hard to get a bartender to do curbside service in the pouring rain. Not to worry. My date opened up the back, pulled out a cooler and voilà– a woo-worthy feast. Yes, no doubt about it … I was being wooed. This guy knew what I liked and had definitely put in an effort ….

He whipped out a shaker-full of martinis … perfectly mixed, divinely diluted to just the right point of intoxicability (yes, I know, it’s not a word). He had Camembert (my favorite) and crackers and nuts and assorted other munchables. It was a moveable feast in a car in the pouring rain. It was a little bit of gastronomic ecstasy.

But eventually the rain let up and I stuffed my hair up under my baseball cap and we set off. In the drizzle.

The Tropical Heatwave is another kind of gorge-worthy feast — a smorgasbord of musical talent. The bands play indoors and out, rain or shine — and the setting is pretty sublime. Nestled in the heart of Ybor … cool buildings all around … cobblestone streets … multiple bands lighting up the night air with electric sound … and … and … raw sex pumping through the air.

Yup, that’s right. Raw sex. It was like being in a Tropical Sex Wave. Coulda knocked your socks off the place was so hot.

Music. Schmusic. This event was about sex, baby. The rock-your-world kind of sex. The kind of sex that can only be had through music that obliterates all other thought in your head and closes down a major part of brain function and directs every cell in your body toward one cause … inundation of the senses.

Maybe it was the martini coursing though my bloodstream … maybe it was because I was a Heatwave virgin … maybe it was the fact that I was on a rather stellar date … maybe it was the rain … but whatever it was … the Tropical Heatwave was nothing short of a lust-fest.

I would think, that if you were married and your sex life was flagging, even thirty minutes at the Wave would send you and your mate both home with a major jones to fix. As it was, being single for so long since my divorce and not really dating much, I think the raw heat of so many kick-ass, very sexy musicians in one place just kind of mesmerized me. I stumbled along, in a bit of a daze behind my date, holding on to his hand with one finger like a little kid so I wouldn’t get separated and lost and end up crying at security with my date’s name being called over a loudspeaker or something.

My date would laugh and talk and say hey to friends he knows and introduce me, and I’d mumble hello and turn my eyes zombie-like back to the stage. I’m fairly certain my date thought I was a cheap date, drunk off one martini, but really, I was just submerged into a near-catatonic state of erotic overload.

We went into the downstairs of the Cuban Club and checked out a hot little number — the Eilen Jewell Band. Then it was up a few flight of stairs to the fourth floor Ballroom to catch Blair Carmen and the Belleview Boys toss out some rockabilly so hip you would have thought Johnny T and Uma T were going to lazy-walk out onto the dance floor, start V-ing their fingers in front of their eyes, and teach us a thing or two from their Pulp Fiction days.

To cool down, we snuck out onto the deck where we watched lightening splay out across the city skyline and second-hand smoked enough cigarettes to make me think I was back in Paris.

On our way back down the stairs, we ran into Rob Lorei — WMNF’s mighty hand and Florida This Week man on the beat — so we said hello and pressed the flesh, reminding him — MC Coolidge! Not quite sure he remembered me but he was very nice.

Back outside, we checked out Michael Burks on one stage, saw Chuck Prophet and the Mission Express (pretty good, pretty damn good) on another, and then walked around to the other side of the courtyard and got blasted into sexual smithereens.

By Trombone Shorty and his band from N’awlins.

Trombone Shorty was smokin’. The stage was at least 25 yards away, but this guy rocked my world like he was standing right behind me, breathing hot and heavy down the back of my neck.

The minute he picked up his trombone, Shorty was like a neutron bomb — throwing off a wave of visceral, you’ve-gotta-have-it raw sex with a capital s and x that blasted from the stage and out across the audience … a force majeure that effectively annihilated any remaining sense of dating decorum I might have had.

The guy was laying down a funk so dunk my mind became a one-track line of lasciviousness.

I let out a whoop, whispered something just this side of obscene to my date, and shook my bootie like a little banshee. I’m sure my date was too well-mannered to ask out loud what he was undoubtedly wondering inside, “What happened to the prim and proper bookworm I brought up here?”

I’d like to think that, a couple of hours later when he dropped me off back at my place in Sarasota, and I leaned in and gave him a Tropical Heatwave-worthy kiss, that he no longer cared where the bookworm had gone or when … or if … she ever came back.

But she did come back. Bookworm MC was up early, watching Stephanopolous and Meet the Press, and reading the paper, and a great article on “this thing of ours” aka the financial mess this country is in in this week’s New Yorker, and in general, being the four-eyed nerd I usually am on Sunday mornings.

But on my list of things to do this week? “Buy Trombone Shorty’s cd.”

If that happens, people, all bookworm bets are off.