02:58 PM PST on Tuesday, January 4, 2005

By JOSEPHINE CHENG / Evening Magazine

If you are like most people, you probably think you are a pretty good kisser. But would you really know if you weren’t? Maybe it’s time to go back to school – to kissing school.

You know how it’s supposed to feel – that electrifying, heart-stopping, mind-altering kiss. But many people never get kisses like that and many never give them.

At Seattle’s Good Shepherd Center, kissing master Cherie Byrd runs what could be the nation’s first kissing school.

Are you a good kisser?

Most people don’t realize when they are not good kissers.

“Unless they have someone give them feedback,” said Cherie.

Such feedback is what launched Cherie’s unusual career. After months of enduring a boyfriend’s unsensual smooches, she gave him a mouthful.

“I knew it was going to be a deal breaker one way or another!” she laughed. “I said we can't really go much further unless you let me teach you how to kiss. And I thought he was going to walk out the door, but no!”

It was a pretty radical thing to do.

Now her first “student” is leading a whole school – one that attracts more eye-popping attention than kissing in public.

Curiosity brings couples to the kissing school – along with some singles who don’t mind puckering up with a stranger.

Class is usually all day and hands on – or lips on.

Cherie says you have to know how to receive as well as how to give.

Whatever your hang-ups are, Cherie says you can kiss them goodbye, because when you go to kissing school, you can do all the homework you desire.