Column: Au naturel
Here it is, summer winding down, and I’ve still never been to a nude beach.
But before we start, let’s define terms. Nude and naked are not the same things, as you know, because naked is really naked, and nude is statues, art classes and the color of certain kinds of catalog underwear. Truth is not nude. Neither are the city, jaybirds or the day you were born. Power and ambition are certainly never nude.
Curiously, many people below the Mason-Dixon line, when stitchless, are neither nude nor naked but have created a whole new form of being in the altogether called nekkid.
To go to a nude beach, I couldn’t be nude, I’d have to be naked, and I wasn’t raised that way.
You see, giving the nude beach a pass is a moral issue, and in no way has anything to do with what I look like when suited birthday casual. Stay with me here.
By the way, there’s no such book called “Nude Lunch” or “The Nude and the Dead.” That dude in Times Square is not The Nude Cowboy. There was “The Naked Chef,” an English (so English he could barely speak at all) TV cook from a few years ago, but he always seemed to be clothed. I don’t get it.
There are no nakedness colonies or camps, but only the nude variety. The best account of visiting a nudist colony is the Reporter’s Charity Robey’s story for the New York Times last December about being invited to one by her mother for a family vacation.
As Charity reported, one advantage of a naked/nude vacation is many decisions are already made for you, noting she went to the resort “easily handling the lightest travel bag I had ever packed.”
Her brilliant account gets to the heart, and other parts, of the matter: “I was anxious … not the least groovy. The sight of my mother’s bare body made me as dizzy as the sight of my own blood. It was too much truth. Still, as a devoted daughter, I would do anything for my mother. Once.”
Check out Charity’s dispatch from the front lines: nytimes.com/2014/12/17/vacationing-in-the-nude-with-mom/.
I once went to a dinner party where the host, a friend of mine, took off all his clothes in front of his guests in the living room. My friend, a sane and decent man, had six vodkas too many and started speechifying about how we were all prisoners of repression. He quoted Mark Twain: “Modesty died when clothes were born.” And then he said, “I feel like I want to take all my clothes off!”
And he did.
It was one of those rare moments when the cliché of being struck speechless applied. People looked away.
Embarrassed, I laughed, and when I turned to Mary, she was staring at me. If looks could kill, I was seriously wounded.
People found their voices and implored him to put his clothes back on, but he had crossed a line and, true to himself — read: hammered — said, “No.”
Our hostess, with the aplomb of someone who believes that ignoring a disaster means it’s not happening, said dinner was served. Everyone was pleased at the prospect that we would only see our host naked from the waist up and could talk some sense to him. Until we sat down and realized the dining room table was glass-topped.
He soon said that if no one was going to join him, he would bow to convention and be clothed for dinner. He got up — no one looked — walked to the bedroom and mercifully passed out.
He told me later that the whole thing was like a dream. But then, remembering (vaguely) the incident, he paraphrased Josephine Baker, the entertainer and activist, who once made a living as an exotic dancer: “I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”
