Clothing Optional Read Online Free Page A

also help in
your
healing process.
    Your pal,
Alan Zweibel

Clothing Optional
    Let me just say at the outset that as I write these words, I am fully clothed. Shirt. Pants. Shoes. You know the look. Now, this is a point writers rarely feel the need to make. Traditionally, they simply go about the task of setting down words with little or no mention as to which parts of their anatomy are covered or exposed. I envy those writers. I used to be one of them. Allow me to explain.
    About a month ago, the pressures of script deadlines made the task of arranging dialogue between characters running around on a movie screen an all-consuming one—to the extent that any distraction was deemed so intrusive, I was absolutely livid when pulled out of a rehearsal to take a call from this magazine.
    â€œAlan, would you ever give any thought to spending time at a nudist club and writing about it?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou can go there whenever you—”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd you can write the piece whenever you—”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAny idea when you might be able—”
    â€œNow.”
    â€œI mean, you’re extremely busy, so—”
    â€œNow.”
    â€œBut all of your other projects—”
    â€œThey can wait. How much do I owe you?”
    â€œFor…?”
    â€œLetting me do this.”
    A CALL TO MY WIFE
    â€œHello?”
    â€œHey, Robin! Guess what? I’ve been asked to write about a nudist club in Palm Springs.”
    â€œI’m not going.”
    â€œWho invited you?”
    Reaction from the rest of my family ranged from my son, Adam, fourteen, begging me to take him along, to my youngest daughter, Sari, seven, who giggled at the thought of “Daddy seeing lots of tushies,” to my embarrassed middle daughter, Lindsay, eleven, who—as I left in the third inning of her West L.A. softball game—found it easier to tell her teammates I was going to the hospital for minor back surgery.
    There were other reactions as well. The most asked question: Are you going to get naked? The least asked: Where are you going to insert your room key when playing naked volleyball? (My dad lost sleep over this one.) The person with the most questions: me. And I started asking them as I turned onto I-10 heading east toward the desert: Why am I doing this? Did I bring enough sunblock? Why am I doing this? When was the last time I was naked in front of a nude woman whom I wasn’t married to and with whom I shared a hamper and three children? What if I run into someone I know? Like Siskel? Or Ebert? Or one of my mother’s friends? What if I get an erection? What if I get an erection in front of one of my mother’s friends? Why am I doing this? And why in God’s name am I sweating this much?
    The air-conditioning in the car was on full blast, yet as I got closer and closer to the exit that would lead me to the land of naked people, my pores were involuntarily soaking every stitch of fabric associated with my forty-four-year-old body, and I was now sort of hoping that somewhere between my daughter’s softball field and all of those windmill things, I’d contracted malaria and would have to call my editor with my regrets and suggest she send a non-Jewish male to research this article.
    The place I was driving toward? The Terra Cotta Inn, which according to the brochure was a “clothing optional” resort. So with the distinct possibility that it was nerves and not a rare tropical disease that was causing me to sweat like a fountain, I began to hang on to the word
optional
the way that actress in
Cliffhanger
hung on to Sylvester Stallone’s hand.
    THE TERRA COTTA INN
    I can’t remember ever knocking more gently than I did on the big gray doors that separate the Terra Cotta Inn from the traffic on East Racquet Club Road. But after a few seconds, the door opened. A woman, dressed only in a romper unzipped to her navel, greeted me.