Standing Out

It's Impossible Not to See

I often respond to someone who takes offense at my nudity by asking them, “Why should you care, I don’t even notice what other people are wearing.” The anonymous person on the beach might as well be invisible, while the naked person stands out like a five alarm fire. Like a unicorn, it’s impossible not to see a naked person. Try as you might your eyes are drawn to the naked person like the Iron Dome to an incoming missile. The naked person could light themselves on fire and it wouldn’t be any more dramatic. They could be walking with Keith Richards and no one would notice Keith.

Nudity is impossible to ignore. Nudity draws a reaction, it draws eyeballs, it draws breaths. People will notice a naked person in a crowd of Where’s Waldos instantly. Put a naked person on a Coney Island crowd of beachgoers and a thousand Brooklynites will get their camera out. A nude person can’t disappear into the scenery or camouflage themselves in the curtains. Nudity is like a blinking red light on a vanilla ice cream cone. Try and look away, but the urge to look back is impossible to squealch. There’s so much to see, questions flood the brain. Who is this person? Why are they naked? Should I shave my pubic region like they do?

The naked person is an eleven car car-crash, a railroad derailment, the president’s motorcade could drive by and you’d look at the nude person, and you’re Lee Harvey Oswald! Nude people could have saved JFK’s life, yet put a nude person in a crowd of nude people and they instantly disappear. Like a tropical fish joining a school of tropical fish swimming happily as a group, each nudist becomes just another flash of skin color. People are easily bored by a lot of nude people, but stand a nude person alone and they become Typhoid Mary, a radioactive orange alert, shocking, amazing fireworks with sparkles coming out of their ears.

Naked people hover, like aliens being beamed down, they glow, they shimmer. People rub their eyes they can’t believe what they see. Naked people are a hallucination, a revelation, a dream come true. It’s impossible not to see a naked person which is why they’re so easily caught. Police can spot them in the clothed rabble from a mile away. There’s nowhere to hide, there’s no telephone booth to change in. The naked person can’t get away, a hundred spectators will make a citizen arrest. A naked person can disguise themselves in clothes, but they can’t hide in a faceless mob of clothes.

Naked people cause chatter like after something big has happened. People circle around and begin to pray, the naked person becomes the main event, like a juggling fire twirler outside Notre Dame Cathedral. Naked people cause whistles, fainting spells and heart attacks. Window-washers fall off ladders, housewives drown the baby. Naked people cause a ruckus like a smashing demolition derby, furious honking like a Manhattan rush hour. They draw oohs and ahhs like a Yankee home run hitter. They’re the bull in a china shop breaking fragile keepsakes, they’re the python thrown into a crowd, hissing at nonbelievers.

Who would want that? All that attention? Cause all that mayhem? Nudists do, because nudists are possessed, they’re Regan in the Exorcist but they’re the ones causing the spinning heads. They’re the volcano erupting hot lava overwhelming the old village, they’re the athlete that can’t be stopped, the truth that can’t be lied to, their bodies a symbol of the power of all humankind.