What’s Your Pleasure?

I once shared a guilty pleasure with an editor.

She and I would occasionally sneak off to a movie in the middle of the day.

It is hard to describe just how delicious this experience was. There we were--temporary fugitives from the yoke of journalism--scrunched down in our theater seats, eating popcorn with real butter and enjoying the simple charms of Mel Gibson on the company’s dime.

I trust you won’t rat me out, because I know you have a few guilty pleasures of your own.

You can’t fool me. I know you keep a Snickers bar in your freezer in case of emergencies, which can range from a good-sized earthquake to a newly discovered ding in the side of your car.

Foodstuffs are a common guilty pleasure.

There was a fine example on a recent episode of the HBO series “The Sopranos.” Tony Soprano, the Prozac-popping mobster played by James Gandolfini, was making ice cream sundaes with his young son.

Ice cream sundaes are guilty pleasures in and of themselves, but Tony Sr. found a way to make them even better. He began shooting the whipped cream into his mouth directly from the aerosol can. The look on Tony’s face was that of a rapturous 8-year-old. He could have skipped his Prozac that day.

There is a thin line between a guilty pleasure and a problem. If you find yourself wondering if you have time to slip out for a cigarette between contractions, it’s probably a danger signal, not a guilty pleasure.

But who would cast the first stone at Sharon Saks, an actress and writer in Studio City?

Saks explains that she likes “to buy a pound of See’s chocolate, which is my very favorite--mixed and everything--and to eat a bite out of each and every one of them.”

She makes this confession with a throaty laugh that makes it clear that she will continue this practice in the future.

And Saks has another vice that she describes as “sinfully delicious.”

“I will grab one or two people and just jet off to Vegas for like 36 hours and go gamble [another throaty laugh], see a bunch of shows and stay up all night.”

When Scott Smith is queried about his guilty pleasures, he says, “I have several. Which one do you want to hear first?” Actually, Smith, an actor and writer who lives in Van Nuys, has just two.

One is a taste for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, acquired when he was growing up in Virginia.

Smith’s play about astronaut rivalry, “King of the Moon,” recently had a run in New York City and, while there, he reports, with a palpable shudder of delight, “I had a Krispy Kreme every morning.”

As any teenager can tell you, guilty pleasures tend to be solitary vices.

Smith chose not to tell his wife, Elizabeth Sampson, about the daily Krispy Kreme, and she is mystified by his other penchant--he likes to hang out at the Westside’s Petersen Automotive Museum.

“How many hours can you spend staring at a car?” she asks.

His answer: “They’re open from 10 to 6, so they’ve already figured it out.”

Approached at a Northridge bookstore, Teresa Foote admits to multiple passions.

“Put shoes down,” says Foote, a resident of Woodland Hills. Sweaters, too. “The rest of the clothes I don’t care about.”

Foote says she can’t stay away from bookstores.

And she also cruises the Internet--especially the electronic auction house eBay--looking for vintage straw spoons. Those, she explains, are long spoons, popular in the 1920s and ‘30s, with hollow handles through which you sucked your malteds.

Chairs are another of Foote’s vices.

The midlife equivalent of ditching school may flood my brain with feel-good endorphins, but that doesn’t mean it will work for you. Guilty pleasures are as individual as fingerprints. I’ve had some good chairs in my time, but clearly they do something for Foote that I can only dream of.

Recently, Foote bought “a kind of graceful, dark, American Rococo chair,” with some nice carving but not a stitch of fabric. She can’t wait to upholster it herself.

“Why would you buy that?” her husband, Bob, wonders, not unkindly. Falling for a certain pretty chair, she explains, involves “a passion in your heart.”

Foote’s got that right.

As to your own guilty pleasures, my advice is: Give in.

Savor the icy Snickers bar, preferably in a steaming, scented bath, lit by candlelight, while listening to Billie Holiday (you need not do this alone).

Life is short.

And you know I’ll never tell.