A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 10
There’s a great American Public Media radio show called “The Story with Dick Gordon.” It’s produced by our local NPR station WUNC. I was driving around one day and heard this story:
Madelyn Greco and Scott Fray were recently in Las Vegas for the first ever North American body painting competition. They came in third in the “brush and sponge” category. The couple met when Scott painted Madelyn’s entire body, unclothed, at a festival. Soon after they became a couple. Now the pair is off to Austria for the world championship of body painting. Dick talks with Madelyn and Scott about their passion for the art form.
The story was how Madelyn and Scott met — he actually body-painted her at some sort of festival. They fell in love and have a business out of Greensboro. Check out their website for some amazing examples of the type of body-art they create. Truly remarkable stuff.
When I heard their story, what struck me was not only their unique vocation, but also the distinctive way they look at the world — where the nude body is something natural, beautiful, to be esteemed and celebrated.
Coincidentally I heard a news item today: “Boulder passes public nudity ban”:
The Boulder City Council has approved an anti-nudity ordinance that doesn’t include a ban on female toplessness.
Boulder’s measure approved Tuesday applies to anyone older than 10.
An early version of the measure would have made it a crime for women to expose their nipples, but that provision was removed. Officials and residents said it was discriminatory since it only applied to women.
The law updates Boulder nudity ban that had applied only at a city lake popular for nude swimming in the 1970s. Officials say not having a local nudity ban meant nude partiers faced state indecency charges, making them vulnerable to being put on a sex offender registry.
If you read that story a couple of times, it just starts to seem rather silly, doesn’t it? “An early version… made it a crime for women to expose their nipples.” Remember how freaked out people were when Janet Jackson had her famous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”?
So I had this crazy idea: What if a person suddenly decided one day to stop wearing clothes? Perhaps they are a businessman or woman. And for whatever reason, they strip and try to go about their life per normal — just sans clothes.
What if this act made the news? The person, our Protagonist, continues to go nude, despite legal efforts. Maybe an ACLU lawyer offers to represent our P pro bono. Maybe they strip down as a symbolic act of support.
Then other people join in, all of them shedding their clothes.
Across the country, instead of meet-ups, there are nude-ups.
Body-painting becomes the new ‘in’ thing, a way to have fashion, but naturally.
I guess I’m envisioning a social satire to force Americans to confront our county’s bizarre dualistic attitude toward the human body: On the one hand we are obsessed with beauty and sexualize nearly everything, yet on the other hand, there is this air of shame and repression that exists. We see it in movies all the time: Characters can get eviscerated, heads lopped off, spewing buckets of blood and a movie gets a PG-13 rating; but show off one penis or use the “F-word” with a specific sexual connotation and that’s an immediate R-rating.
Against that backdrop, what if one person spawned a revolution by going nude?
Do you see a story here?
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