While we're on the Subject of Nudity

It’s not like I’m obsessed with people being naked. Please don’t think I am. Because I’m not. Okay!!! Friends from my Bible study read my blog and I certainly don’t want them praying for me because they assume I have some unhealthy addiction, other than watching reruns of Wife Swap on Lifetime. It’s just that I’ve had lots of response to the last posting about locker room nudity. People keep coming up and sharing their stories about getting embarrassed while they happened to be bare-assed (Sorry to be crude, but I couldn’t resist.) Some stories I would’ve probably kept to myself.

A friend of mine, I’ll call her Lynda, because I like making up fake names for people, was telling me how she used to walk around naked in front of her roommates in college all the time, completely rattling their confidence about bringing home dates. Actually, Lynda didn’t tell me her story in person. She accidentally posted it, in vivid detail, as her Facebook status update. I’m still laughing.

I once had a college roommate like Lynda. Her name was, uhhhh (thinking)….Samantha. Yeah, that was it. Samantha wasn’t normally a nudist. 95% of the time she was the perfect roommate. It was only when guys would come over that her clothes disappeared. They just seemed to vaporize. Like one minute she’d be sitting there in jeans and a sweater, working on a bulletin board for her education class. The doorbell would ring. It was Ryan from downstairs. Next thing I knew, she was completely in the buff, still cutting out felt hearts and flowers. Two seconds had passed. Samantha hadn’t even had time to throw her hair into a ponytail, much less strip down naked. Her discarded clothes weren’t crumpled up in a ball on the floor either. They were completely gone. I swear. It was like an episode of Star Trek. Samantha could nonchalantly “beam” herself naked. It was disconcerting to say the least, not a trait I look for in a roommate.

I once met a nice guy named Brian, or Bob or Ben. (It’s been a long time). But I remember he was in my Math for Liberal Arts Majors class. We’d planned to go out on a Thursday night. He’d pick me up at my apartment.

Digression
Math For Liberal Arts Majors was an unoffensive title for a class that should’ve been called Math for Numerical Retards. Or Math for People who Should Marry Someone Who will Take Care of Them Financially or Math for People Who Can Write a Beautiful Essay, but Wouldn’t Know a Fraction if it Came up and Cut them in Half. But, the most applicable name of all would’ve been “Math for People who HAVE to Major in Liberal Arts because They Don’t Have a Prayer of Passing College Algebra, which is Required for All Other Majors.” Of course, most of these alternate names were too long to list in the school catalog.

In this class, we strung beads onto pipe cleaners and counted the dots on dice and dominoes. On Fridays, we played “store.” Our instructor would bring out the brightly colored pretend cash register and divvy out a stack of Monopoly money. He would place stuffed animals and plastic food items around the room for students to “purchase.” Every week, I bought the pink poodle and even made correct change a few times. During exams, the teacher highly encouraged use of our fingers and toes to solve problems. Calculators were for upper level classes. I think I pulled a “C” overall.
End of Digression

Okay, back to Brian or Bernie. Thursday rolled around. I was excited. He was nice, witty, charming, had good hair and wore Obsession for Men, the intoxicating venom d’amour that caused me to pant openly.

I cleaned the apartment, rearranged furniture, stressed about what to wear, showered using my “only for special occasions” Venezuelan vanilla bean body scrub. On the living room book shelves, I replaced my Sandra Brown trash novels with Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Dorothy Parker titles, none of which I’d read, but would perhaps make me seem intelligent, philosophical and a tad wicked. Samantha was doing homework in her room.

At 7:29, I took a last look in the mirror. Understated angora sweater with just a slight hint of cleavage paired with not too short mini-skirt. My Jennifer Anniston “Rachel from Friends” hairdo was perfect. I was HOT in a somewhat modest feminine ‘90’s sort of way.

The doorbell rang. I strolled to the door to let in my mathematically challenged Romeo. After a practiced greeting that was neither overzealous nor nonchalant, I left him waiting on the living room couch so I could make five minutes worth of finishing touches.

I’ll never know exactly what transpired in the living room while I stood staring in the floor length mirror next to my bed. All I know is that when I walked back out to say “okay, I’m ready,” shock and horror filled my being as I saw a completely nude Samantha. Well, not completely, she was wearing a Walkman, or rather just the headphones, since there was nothing to hook the rest of it to. I could hear that 90’s song we’d all like to forget “Macarena” vibrating through the speakers. Utter disbelief flooded over me when I realized that Samantha was also doing a personal Macarena dance routine to my stunned date, who sat plastered against the couch. His eyes were a mix of panic and adventure. If you’ve never seen the Macarena, click the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NZjHKfbbiQ

Without the benefit of a full sound system, Samantha looked like a naked hyperactive mime bobbing and gyrating to her own internal soundtrack. Like a startled cook running for the extinguisher after setting a pot holder on fire, I grabbed my grandmother’s quilt, shook it open and hurled it at her. Then I sort of herded her back into her bedroom, pulling the door shut with an exaggerated slam.

“Party Pooper!” she shouted through the wall.

In spite of eventually having fun that night, hearing a killer band and shooting darts at a bar downtown, I never went out with Bob again. Didn’t return his phone calls. It was just too weird.

Samantha later apologized and blamed her behavior on a new allergy medication she was taking. “Wow,” I thought. “Can you imagine the warning label on that drug?” May cause spontaneous, involuntary strip teasing to trendy, yet tasteless ‘90’s pop music.

I spent less and less time at our apartment, opting for safer places to bring dates, like the library, church and small claims court. When our lease was up, Samantha and I went our separate ways. Someone told me a while back that she was a pole dancer at a club in Atlanta. I guess it’s good that she stayed true to her talents.

Women's Locker Room Decorum

All names in this blog entry have been changed to protect the unclothed… and their inadvertent victims.

My friend Jessica just called, jarring me out of my writer’s block, to tell me that she’d once again been optically assaulted in the gym locker room by Carlie Crenshaw’s naked breasts. I knew exactly what Jessica had experienced because it happened to me last week… and the week before. Carlie is one of those “overly proud of her body” age 40-something gym goers who would much rather spend an hour prancing around the locker room stark naked, than actually doing any kind of exercise. It’s as if she’s trying out for the part of a middle-aged Crystal on Girls Next Door and we, her not so body-confident audience members, should be honored to admire her firm, cellulite free, silicone free body. I wouldn’t be surprised if she soon has a dancing pole installed next to the towel racks. It’s pretty unnerving trying to lace my tennis shoes, and have Carlie asking me questions like a reporter for Nude TV News (it actually exists). “Angela, are you playing Mah Jong at the Heart Association benefit this coming Tuesday? Angela, whose football team did Andrew get on? Angela, have you tried the new Zumba class yet?” “Carlie, I’ll answer you when you get dressed. I just can’t carry on everyday conversations with naked people. Call it a character flaw of mine.” It’s like I can’t hear what she’s saying because her nudity shouts louder than any words coming from her mouth. “I’m naked! I’m naked! Look at me! NAKED!”

“For God sake, woman, haven’t you ever heard of a bathrobe?”

I’m sure a nudist or someone less puritanical would get a kick out of mine and Jessica’s horror of casual public nakedness. It’s not just us, though. Most of the women at our gym are very modest, taking advantage of private changing stalls, or trying to hold up a towel with one hand while negotiating undergarments with the other. During this awkward procedure, the rest of us are doing our own modesty dances, trying to act as natural as possible. Conversation is kept to a minimum. The only time I’d purposely speak is to alert someone that she has just caught fire or about to be bitten by a venomous snake (neither of which has ever happened, but I wouldn’t hesitate to speak up if it did) Normally, I just stare at the floor or count electrical outlets. There are nine, by the way. I think that’s probably how it is in most Middle Georgia women’s locker rooms, not that I’m doing research or installing hidden cameras. Women around here tend to be more modest than those in say….California.

California…Another Locker Room Altogether
I spent ten years living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where women’s locker rooms are live dioramas of National Geographic tribal photo shoots and new age nudity rallies. The Pleasant Hill YMCA, where I worked out, was the chosen fitness facility of an entire population of retired porn stars who still enjoyed letting it all hang out, or down, or both. There were rules (probably buried in the yearly contract) stipulating that every person, upon entering the locker room, must shed every article of clothing and spend the next two hours leisurely visiting with every other naked person in there. Everyone sat around in their birthday suits trading work-out tips, sipping wheat grass smoothies, applying make-up, sometimes even playing an impromptu game of charades.

The upside to it all was that I never had to wait for a changing stall, since they weren’t used, except by me and Anna Leigh, the Y’s other token Southerner. Too bad she was eventually frightened away by a 400 pound, nearsighted swimmer named Janice, who one day entered the locker room, peeled off her Coleman tent swimsuit and accidentally sat down right on top of Anna Leigh, leaving a titanic set of posterior prints across the front of her Junior League t-shirt. The dripping and somewhat flatter Anna Leigh fled from the Y screaming, never to be seen (clothed or naked) again.

While 99% of the time, I averted my eyes from anyone wearing less than a choir robe at the Y, nonetheless I was fascinated with a seven-inch tattoo of a buffalo (a self-portrait of sorts) that Janice had across her colossal midsection. Whenever Janice walked around, the buffalo, jarred by jiggling fat, seemed to spring into action, as if doing a slow motion gallop across the rolling terrain of Janice-land (which is probably a lot like Montana). It was like one of those moving cartoon drawings, where a figure is sketched slightly differently on each page of a 100 sheet notebook. If you flip through the pages really fast, it looks like the figure is running. That’s what Janice’s buffalo looked like. It fascinated me! But I digress.

As a child, I was taught that physical modesty is a virtue up there with making good cornbread and writing thank you notes. My mother and sister even showered fully dressed. Until age six, I’d never seen a grown woman naked and assumed that they looked like my Barbie dolls… all hard and plastic with golden skin color. Come to think of it, that’s pretty appropriate considering today’s woman’s penchant for plastic surgery, hair removal and tanning products.

It wasn’t until I ran across my dad’s Playboy collection that I learned the truth. Just as I was pulling out the centerfold, with jaw agape at Miss August’s breasts which were the size of beauty salon hair dryer hoods, my mom stormed in. I nearly ripped the magazine apart trying to hide the model’s bodily wares from her prudish eyes.

From the look on her face, I could tell she was shocked that I’d discovered these publications of skin sin in the master bedroom closet, nestled next to my dad’s shoe shining kit. “Put that trash down, young lady! “Sorry, Mom,” I said, a precocious smart aleck, even then. “I was just looking for a copy of Highlights. But unless they have a radically new format and target audience, this probably isn’t it.”

My first experience in a real gym locker room came in fifth grade, the beginning of a pathetic P.E. career for this uncoordinated, underdeveloped, asthmatic middle schooler. On the first day of school, our gym teacher, an eight foot tall, paddle wielding, silver-haired drill sergeant pointed to the girls’ locker room with a two foot index finger and a shrill coach’s whistle blow that accompanied his every gesture.

Each morning when second period rolled around, my classmates and I headed down narrow concrete steps into a long, dank, freezing dungeon with one light bulb dangling over a crude bench built in the 1400’s. Since the 15 watt bulb didn’t put out much in the way of illumination, the far end of the room was pitch black. A perpetual dripping and a noise like a rhinoceros having digestive problems came from the dark end. I wondered if some bestial, horned creature was chained up just beyond our visibility, like the three-headed dog in Harry Potter.

We all learned to dress out silently, in under four seconds in the dim cave that more closely resembled a Medieval holding cell than Bally Total Fitness.

As high school rolled around, I tried to avoid the locker room as much as possible. Cruel, big bosomed girls enjoyed taunting their less developed, lower pecking order classmates by forcing them outside just as they were in mid-clothes change, often wearing only their undies. This was especially humiliating since the outside door locked automatically and was right next to the weight room. It never happened to me because I had the foresight to ask for an internship with the lunchroom ladies during P.E. time. While other sad “A-minus” cupped girls were being brutalized, I was learning the delicate culinary arts of tater-tottery and chicken strip battering. It’s a decision that has served me well in so many areas of life.

Perhaps next time Carlie begins her post workout strip tease, Jessica and I should shove her out into the weight area. Dang it! Wouldn’t work! Men would be dropping their bars and bells all over the place and she’d just get more motivation for becoming a burlesque dancer. I think for now, I’ll just continue to count electrical outlets. Maybe I’ve missed one somewhere.

Ironies and Exercise

Ironic: I live in a house with two 18-step staircases that I avoid at all costs, only to spend thirty minutes on the Stairmaster at the gym four times a week. I wonder if Alanis Morissette would agree. At the Fairview Park Fitness Center, where dozens of workout machines are lined up like minutemen waiting to spring into action, I choose the Stairmaster. Like a veteran cowboy swaggering up to his trusted steed, I mount the machine, give her a greeting, and crank her up to level seven. It’s the highest I can go without my heart punching its way out of my chest cavity and bouncing across the floor. Yet it feels good to sweat. Feels even better to see the increasing numbers flying across the calorie counter screen, like mile marker signs flying past me on the Autobahn (like I’ve ever been on the Autobahn, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have mile markers, maybe kilometers).

For that half-hour, I am power. I am Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France, Lindsay Davenport grunting out an ace, Jerry Rice running a touchdown. As the final second passes on the machine’s timer and the steps fall back into their down position, I throw my fists into the air, victoriously posing for an imaginary Sports Illustrated photographer. I am Angela Weight, Stair Stepper Conqueror. If stair-stepping were an Olympic event, I’d be a gold medalist. Come to think of it, why isn’t it? I think I’ll write a letter to whoever’s in charge, or better yet, call Tell It.

At home, my staircases are plushly carpeted and have no resistance settings to challenge my muscles. They offer the accommodations of support railings and smiling family photos on the walls. Yet the simple task of taking a basket of laundry upstairs, something that takes all of four seconds, equals, in my mind, an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. All throughout the day, I set items that need put away on steps three, four and five, like a gondola slowly loading enough passengers to warrant the treacherous climb up to Andrew and Jack’s bedrooms. I could go weeks without seeing the second floor. The steps are just too steep, my muscles just too weak, unless it’s a stair master.

Lots of my friends forego the gym's indoor machines altogether and do something that I find vastly curious. They run. They run and run and run, making even Jesse Owens and Forrest Gump seem like slaggards. Now I know there’s not a lot to do here in Dublin, GA and sometimes it’s good to get back to basic rudimentary activities like starting fires with sticks and hunting buffalo with homemade spears, but I’ve never understood the draw to running. My friends run marathons. I get tired just driving 26.2 miles. Going that distance on foot would be an extra special kind of Hell. In fact, the only way I could ever endure it is to be chased by a large, hungry animal, such as a lioness hunting for her cubs’ next meal. There’s something about not wanting to be served as dinner that motivates us all to do things we wouldn’t normally.

I’m sure there are others who feel the same way, who need the added incentive of an angry carnivore chomping at their heels, to have a successful run. Gyms across the country should consider stocking wild predators for runners to rent as needed. Those looking to for a good not-too-taxing jog could rent out an elderly nearsighted rhinoceros, while marathoners seeking to carve minutes off their overall time might be brave enough to don a gazelle costume and rent the teenage male cheetah for an hour.

Another reason I don’t run - running off. It's a well-known phenomenon (to everyone except me, until recently) that long-distance runners can experience unavoidable, uncontrollable bowel movements at the most unfortunate times, like between the start and finish lines. I tend to shy away from any form of exercise that could lead to the public display of bodily functions better performed in a toilet stall with a copy of The New Yorker.

A few months ago, my mom volunteered to work the finish line at the Wrightsville annual 5K. She was shocked to notice a woman in white spandex leggings, the first to cross the finish. Just below the number posted on her back was what appeared to be a melted, smeared king-sized Hershey bar on her backside. (This could’ve led to the woman's impressive speed.) At some point during the race, that bran muffin she had eaten for breakfast began to work its magic and she didn’t have the foresight to wear a Depends or bring along a roll of Charmin. When you get that urge to go big potty, the last place you want to be is in the middle of a human stampede with nary a porta-potty in sight. I (and my colon) cringe at the thought. And the last thing you want to be wearing is tight white spandex running shorts. Perhaps God chose that day to punish the woman for some dastardly deed from her distant past.

I recounted the story to my husband James, a former marathon runner and current couch potato. His response startled me. “Honey, that happens a lot in races. You’ll see runners squatting by the road, in the bushes, next to vehicles. It’s pretty common. People don’t think much of it.” According to James, all the pavement pounding that a runner does shakes things up internally and can set the digestive system into full sprint. Call me shallow and introverted, but since being potty trained at age two, I’ve always kept bathroom activities to myself and plan to keep it that way.

I was still skeptical and incredulous at James’ explanation, so I did a Google search of running while running. For those of you checking out this phenomenon for yourself, the actual name is “Runner’s Trots.” Sounds almost novel, definitely better than “Marathon Shits” or “Sprinter’s Splatters.” The first photo result was of a former Boston Marathon winner crossing the finish line. Apparently she'd left a brown trail from about mile 17. And from the photo, I could tell that she'd eaten corn for dinner the previous night. I imagine the announcer saying “Congratulations, Ms. Uta Pippig. You’ve just won the Boston Marathon! Here’s your trophy and a box of wet wipes. Now tell me…. was winning the BM worth having a public BM?”

Life's biggest moment... and you spend it covered in feces for all the world to see. Now THAT’s ironic. Even Alanis Morrisette would agree.

For now, I'll stick to the stairmaster with a restroom close by.