Stuff in the Buff

Rumor had it that the old guy, a lifelong batchelor, used to walk beans in his altogether. That's what people said. 

True or not, for some reason the image was a delight and even understandable to those of us subject to ordinary sexual anxieties, helped me at least understand how a batchelor deals with his own brand of those undeniable urges most all of us are subject to. Simple, he struts his stuff beneath the open sky. Makes better sense than straight-jacket denial.

Must be nice, in fact. I grew up with a bunch of boys who would head out to what seemed to us to be lakeshore wildernesses, where we'd mess around all day long, occasionally stopping to pee in chorus. One of those guys--it wasn't me--used to say at those moments, "So nice out, I think I'll keep it out." And we'd giggle, barndooring our apparatus only reluctantly.

I didn't say things like that because I never learned lines like that at home. I didn't have a big brother--and I was raised a Calvinist. Puritanical is too stark an adjective, really. My parents were not dour scolds. But the mere idea of Saturday night family baths in some kitchen tub, stories farm kids used to tell, seemed beyond belief. I don't remember much skin around the house.

Maybe that's why nudism still seems beyond me. There's the sexual thing, of course, but there's also the plain-and-simple matter of such sheer revelation. After all, I'm guessing most people's altogether isn't anything bound for a magazine cover real soon. The only time I come home from nights away and don't determine I'm going on a diet are those times I haven't stayed in a motel with a bathroom mirror big enough to capture half the town. Even with fig leaves, who'd really want to reveal all? Takes some guts. I'm at the age when wearing a swimming suit should be a private act. 

But then, maybe that very squeamishness makes me the Puritan I tell myself I'm not. Maybe I'm just envious of all those nudists and their blessed tennis rackets. Maybe I'm fascinated simply because it's something I can't imagine doing and being. Look at those old farts up there at the top of the page. They're happy as clams. What's wrong with me?

If someone out there has figured out this whole sexual thing, write me a note, okay? Still is a mystery to me, and I'm almost 70 years old.

But that's not the story. The story is that a gang of nudists in Bern, Switzerland--and why is it that I associate nudism with Europe anyway?--is it all those nude beaches? We have them too! 

Anyway, there's a whole company of men and women who rather like to appear Edenic. They find each other somehow, I guess. How come you never see ads? 

Anyway, there was a gathering, an ordinary gathering at a spa or something. Maybe they were roasting marshmellows--I don't know, browning something or other; and one of 'em looks up in the sky. That makes sense? Where do you put your eyes if you're a nudist? Do you look at others' apparatuses? Do you deliberately not look? If no one looks, what's the big deal?

Once upon a time my parents went to something akin to a Playboy Club, an amazing thing in itself. It was a business trip kind of thing, chasing clients and such. Mom claimed that Dad ordered a meal from a woman baring fulsome flesh running over from both cups. Nonetheless, she said, he proceeded to order his scampi as if those voluptuous breasts were an everyday thing. For some odd reason, Mom loved to tell that story.

Back to the Bern story. These sweet Swiss nudists, on exhibition, look up instead of sideways and someone notes this rather odd machine hovering. Did you read the story somewhere?

It had to happen. Drones are everywhere these days. Get 'em on Amazon, all kinds of them.

So some guy with a drone mounted with a video camera to become a spa spy. By the way, here's one for just $35:

Some guy with a drone thought he'd make a feature film from the nudists. Amazing no one else thought of that. Someone must have. Somewhere right now, I bet, there's some creepy guy (why is it always a male?) sitting in front of a screen like the one I'm looking into and reviewing footage from Altogether Beach or whatever. Had to happen.

Officials from the Bern spa where the geeky peeping happened warned whoever it was at the helm of that he (or she, but I doubt it) should prepare to be prosecuted.

I don't know why all of that's funny, but I think it is. Maybe it's just the whirling technology hovering over all that flesh. Did they, Adam and Eve-like, run for cover or just stomp off to the office and complain? Did they clutch towels? What did the pilot see? 

Maybe what he got out of it was ten minutes of golf, ten minutes like the shot up there at the top of the page. 

Boy, that was worth it.

Takes all kinds to make a world.