The Naked Truth

The first nude beach I ever visited was in Nice, France. I hadn't realized it was a nude beach until I looked around. Nothing gets by me. I shucked my new lavender French string bikini, which really made very little difference, anyway.

Everyone was gorgeous, and since I was very young, too, I just assumed that people looked like that without their clothes. This thought kept me going for a very long time.

I nearly drowned in the Mediterranean. As I was going down for the second time, I noticed Mr. Clean sans swimsuit standing about 50 feet away, near the shore. I yelled for help, but he merely stared at me in fascination.

Finally, I yelled "Au secours," literally "to the rescue." High school French. It was the best I could do. He immediately sprang into action and cut through the water like a barracuda, grabbing me as I went down a third time. He hauled me back to shore, where a couple of nude Frenchmen took turns performing artificial respiration on me until I coughed up enough seawater to influence the tides.

A few years later, I went for a 10-mile walk on Fire Island, NY, and suddenly noticed that everyone was naked in one of the areas I passed through. I stripped off my bikini and continued on my way, putting it on again when I reached the boundary of the nude beach.

I recently took a stroll with my camera along the beach that borders San Francisco Bay, looking for new vantage points from which to shoot the Golden Gate Bridge. I noticed a pink person walking toward me in a flesh-colored bathing suit. As he got closer, I distinctly saw something swinging back and forth below his waist. It dawned on me that there were naked people all over the beach, walking, running, making out, and just sunning themselves on blankets. (I hope they were using sunscreen on those formerly-sheltered body parts.) The only other discernible women were playing frisbee with each other, pendulous shriveled breasts bouncing painfully at about the level of their pouched bellies.

It was fairly shocking. I am not a prude, and would like to believe that the human form is beautiful. But in most cases, it really isn't. Michelangelo would have us think so. But then, he could choose his models. Our fascination with nudity has been conditioned by Hollywood babes and hunks, buffed, toned and liposuctioned. The fact is, most people do not have beautiful bodies and exhibiting them in public is a really bad idea.

Sorry, folks, but this is not negotiable.

Fat and flab and love handles and jiggling boobs and scrotums are not thrilling to behold. They should not be played with outside. They just shouldn't.

This is a beautiful city. We should all strive to keep it that way.