What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [75]
Over the years, Siggi, a slim, vain man, had regularly criticized Naomi for her fluctuations in size and her tendency to put on a few pounds. He believed his wife should be slim and attractive. “I never had a model’s figure. And it became a problem in our lives,” she said. “I spent a lot of time in spas trying to lose the weight.”
Indeed, in 1982, at age forty-seven, she was at a spa in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, trying once again to lose weight to please Siggi, when she picked up a local magazine and came across an article about a nudist colony in nearby Haddonfield, New Jersey. She was tired and dispirited by the monotonous daily spa routine of exercise classes, group walks, and spa diet. “Being bored, I was curious,” she said and, on a whim, she decided to call and see if anyone would be admitted into the colony. She was given directions and instructed to bring a beach towel and a folding chair.
The nudist colony was off Route 80 and, “as they always are,” at the end of a road. After Naomi signed in and paid her entrance fee, she was directed to park and then walk up a hill to “the sun field.” “I felt a little timid, so I wrapped myself in the big beach towel I had brought and then I walked up to the crest of the hill carrying my chair. And all of a sudden, the land falls away. And I see several hundred naked people laying there, young, old, men, women, and children. So I think, This looks pretty interesting. And I walked down and opened my beach chair, keeping my towel around me at first.” After a while, she summoned the courage to open her towel. Soon thereafter, she heard someone say, “You’re new here, aren’t you?” Much to her embarrassment, there was a naked, elderly man looming over her chair. “I nearly went cross-eyed trying not to look at him,” she laughed. When he soon asked her if she wanted to go to see the nature walk, she excused herself, saying she was quite allergic to bug bites. “I figured if I survived that moment, I could survive anything.”
As funny as her initiation into nudism was, becoming a nudist proved a serious revelation.
“It was a discovery to see that people were looked at because of who they were and not because of their bodies. Curiously enough, there are very few perfect bodies in the nudist world,” Naomi said. “People were overweight and they were skinny. They had mastectomies. They had bulges. They had amputations. They had people who were grossly overweight. Nobody cared. Either they liked you because you were a nice, pleasant person and interesting to talk to or meet, or they didn’t care to meet you, whether you had clothes on or not.”
A couple of years later, while vacationing in Florida, she visited a clothing optional resort near Tampa and decided to check it out. “I had no idea how I would feel. I saw this community of children and parents and grandparents who were nude, complete families sitting around, and it seemed very natural. So I went as a visitor the first time and kept going back. People have a total misconception about it. They imagine people fornicating under every bush. They don’t understand that it’s a liberating, honest experience. It removes all those social barriers, whether you’re wearing designer clothes, designer pocketbooks or jewelry. It’s a leveler of society. You become more interested in people rather than the manifestations of wealth or accomplishment.”
Most important for Naomi, she felt fully accepted. “These people didn’t give a damn that I was overweight. They liked me and they spoke to me. I was no longer in my husband’s shadow. I didn’t have to worry about his criticism, and I blossomed as a person. I literally became more assertive in my thinking, in my talking, and in my behavior. I realized that just