Naked in the shower

In the women's shower at CWRU there was a culture of nakedness. The swim team set the bar. The ladies flooded the shower stalls with their nubile fitness -- turned up the steam, the gossip, the lather -- and doused their nakedness under shared nozzles. Their team spirit rubbed off on some of us -- kind of liberating, truth be told.

It's different at the community pool. Early on, I resisted pulling the shower curtain across my cubicle like a wild mare fights the rope. But in this culture of privacy, I felt a subtle pressure to sacrifice my anarchist principles to the greater good. What that good is, I cannot say.

The Michigan Wymen's Music Festival offers a unique concept of naked showering. One thing you notice at the festival is what can be accomplished by women and girls left to their own devices. They build stages, raise eating tents, drive garbage trucks, manage the whole extravaganza. The shower set-up is a waist high railing adorned with about 20 spigots spitting out very cold water. I was sleeping in a tent with my sister, sister-in-law and niece. For their sakes if not my own, I thought I might shower. They came along, and so we were four grubby campers joining a line of women awaiting their turn at the spigot. Another thing you find at the festival is that females of all description are welcome; many are lesbian. I did think about the long row of eyes watching me strip down and get clean under the Michigan sun. I felt kind of cold, eventually clean, and free to accept myself and the many sets of eyes belonging to sisters, daughters, nieces and aunts waiting in a long line.

Spencer Tunick recently came to town to shoot pictures of naked Clevelanders amassed on the East 9th Street peer. I caught some of NPR's coverage):

A naked female reporter -- The women had this definite feeling that there were men ogling them.

A naked male reporter -- Meanwhile I stood with some other husbands and boyfriends, watching the women's shoot. In awe we shared with each other our impressions of this stunning mass of beautiful smooth female forms.

Showers naked to the sky leave a permanent curve in my memory. A Girl Scout roundup at Camp Drum had open air showers in converted army barracks. When copters of army guys chopped along overhead, we dearly hoped they were ogling us.

Once, after a raft trip on the Youghagany, Diane led me to the showers. 'Here's my favorite part of the day,' she told me. Sure enough, sun and spray bearing down on exhausted muscles and burnt skin enveloped the day in a sheen of unadulterated joy.

There is an island in Canada I have sometimes visited. The shower on the hill looks up at pine needles and out on sails and the bay and the evergreen islands. There is more to this shower than getting clean. It is a timeless shedding of privacy, an everlasting reminder of the greater good.