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 forty-something gymgoers 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’s 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 workout tips, sipping wheatgrass smoothies, applying makeup, 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 percent 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 one-hundred-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 1400s. Since the fifteen-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 postworkout 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.
