"Let me get a look at you."

Tony Chiu is sitting at his dining room table appraising my market value. I'm pretending to apply for a job with his new companionship agency, Tony's Finest Escorts, and we're about to do the physical evaluation.

I suck in my stomach until my ribs poke out and clip my hands on my hips like Bettie Page. Chiu gnaws his pen.

"Well, you got a nice ass … and what are those?" he asks, motioning toward my chest. "Cs?"

I correct him and score points for being au natural. Things are going well, I think. He doesn't buy it when I tell him what I weigh and says he'll only dock a pittance for my nose ring.

"I could probably do $500," he says. "Eight hundred max."

Wait, what? That's it? Five hundred measly dollars—that's all I'm worth? But I went to college! I have perfectly straight teeth and Botticelli curves and I know how to say "eggplant" in three different languages. Chiu, sensing my incredulity, adds, "Well, I really need to see a little more."

The adult industry turned a $12.6 billion profit last year and while Chiu's porn site, www.PhillyAmateurs.net, made decent coin, the aspiring poon tycoon dreams of the opulence shown on MTV Cribs. His a-ha! moment came while watching high rollers piss away dough on Delilah's strippers. A Mercedes here, a house in Conshohocken there—all for a little quality time in the champagne room. "That's why Heidi Fleiss was so successful," says the 22-year-old. "Girls dream of landing that sugar daddy."

TFE's proposed rate structure is one of the highest Philadelphia's ever seen, ranging from $500 to $1,500 an hour and $2,500 to $10,000 a night. (An informed source tells me the going rate here is $100 an hour.) I wondered: Who are these Daddy Warbuckses of Walnut Street?

"Doctors and lawyers, business types, TV personalities and politicians," says Chiu. You get what you pay for and with TFE, Chiu says clients expect cheerleaders, strippers, porn stars and pageant queens. He chooses his words carefully, of course, calling himself a "middleman" and saying he has no idea what goes on behind closed doors. "You've seen Pretty Woman, right?" he asks. "It's sorta like that, but without the sex."

So what's it take to be a $10,000-a-night call girl in a broke-ass town like Philly?

Chiu agreed to walk me through the screening process. The first question was about adult industry experience.

"I sometimes dance naked around my apartment," I say. Chiu is not impressed, so I tell him how I've written articles about vomit porn and foot-fetish parties and … I stop when I realize how not-hot I sound.

Next: What do I enjoy doing?

"Well, I kinda like bending a guy --"

"No, like hobbies. Fine culture, art, wine—you know, hobbies." I draw a blank.

Any formal college education? "Yes!" I exclaim, and launch into a mesmeric account of four years in J-school.

"So you know how to start up a magazine company?"

"Well, no, not exactly …"

My confidence is waning by the nanosecond. Which brings us back to the physical evaluation and my epiphany that if this were American Idol for Hookers, I'd be Scott Savol, the one everyone votes for because they're trying to sabotage the fucking contest. So what if my thighs are dimpled like ricotta and I've got a few (dozen) lightning-bolt stretch marks? I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, men should be forking over their mortgage payments to have sex with me.

Fortunately Chiu drops some magic words at the end of our interview: "If a girl's holding a position over men, like a CEO … or a journalist… that is such a turn-on."

Good to know those $60,000 in school loans are paying off.

Questions? Comments? Just love anal? E-mail ashlea.halpern@citypaper.net. No phone calls please.