Hot Tub Pot Lucks and Nudist Parents
And other nightmares of a 1970’s teenager seeking acceptance
I don’t know what the other kids were doing with their parents in the 1970’s, but they weren’t going to art museums, seeing naked Greek god statues, and fluffy paintings of cherubic women with pink nipples sprawled out on a chaise lounge. And theater! I went to a naked rendition of Taming of the Shrew, and another play featuring President Nixon with a giant foam penis for a nose before I was age 10. I relied on the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family to show me what a “normal” life was like. But I also loved I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched because I also wanted to be magic. So, ya, I wanted to be normal and magic.
I could only assume that other families in my neighborhood were making dinner, cleaning the house, and watching their shows on giant floor cabinet TVs. We went out to dinner almost every night. She put a TV in my room, because she didn’t want to watch it, and she taught me to play her baby grand piano. I grew up listening to Dvorak, Beethoven, and Chopin and performed dance shows in the living room when she got home from work. I’d frequently raid her lingerie drawer for costumes. I could wear her fishnet pantyhose like a bodysuit!
Mom was not normal and, as an extension of her, neither was I. I talked her into joining a church, it seemed like the perfect machine to churn out normal people. We could wear pretty dresses and have church friends, but my mom chose a hippy church in the Berkeley hills. They had non-God Sundays, we celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas — they were doing same sex marriages back in the 70s and my mom would play the giant pipe organ for them. None of these church activities fed the image of averageness that I so desperately craved.
Mom was the co-founder and enthusiastic member of a church social group called “The Singles” and I think it was very open. A little too open for me. She had taken me along on many excursions with the Singles Group that included family ski trips, campouts, and lots of painfully long potluck parties, which was a real thing in the 70s. Everybody had a potluck dish back then. Swedish meatballs, tuna casserole with potato chips crumbled on top, and jello salads. Mom’s specialty was a giant can of Chef Boyardee Meat Ravioli, put in a casserole dish, with layers of parmesan cheese on top, and then browned in the oven. It was hugely popular, according to her. My mom never learned how to cook so for us, this two-ingredient dish was a real homemade special treat because the oven would get heated up and you could smell it all over the house.
You know what was also very en vogue in the ‘70s? Nudity. Running around naked in public was a 70s craze. You’d be watching a live show and all of a sudden a streaker would zip in and out of a live TV broadcast. There were streakers at the Academy Awards show, sporting events, and college campuses everywhere. I mean you just could not get away from penises back then.
When I was 12, my best friend was having a sleepover with 5 girls. Jessie was a horse girl, which means that she was, and probably still is, an alpha, a boss of everybody and everything. It took a girl like that to talk five puberty stricken girls into doing something terrifying and possibly illegal like streaking through the streets on a rainy night. I refused and instead gallantly volunteered to hold the door for them. They stripped down by the front door and went screaming out the door into the streets. (you may be asking yourself “where are the parents?” We didn’t have parents in the 70s).
As I stood there, diligently doing my one job as door security, the girls came piling back, fighting each other to get inside, the last one slipped and fell face down, ass up, into the foyer and I knew I had made the right choice as I watched her flailing around on the ground, humiliated and bruised.
I come from a family of nudists and I’m a disappointment. My grandmother, who was a proper Texan lady and wife of the mayor, would sit on a park bench in her dress, garter belt, and stockings … without panties. She’d just sit there with her knees slightly open and let it all air out. To be fair, it was bloody hot in Texas and they had those women bound up in all varieties of punishment. She was a silent rebel. Years later, when she went to live in a retirement home, she sometimes refused to wear clothes. The other inmates complained so they kicked her out.
My mom was pissed. She felt that nudity was a natural right and didn’t like to feel restricted at all. But I was becoming a teenager. I was like a quiet gentle-fuzzy caterpillar becoming a beautiful bitchy butterfly. And the need to fit in with the other teenage bitch butterflies was the mission of every moment of every day. I was sure that nobody else’s mother walked around without clothes. My intolerance for our abnormalities had reached the breaking point.
One night, my mom was hosting a party with her Singles Group and I had expertly negotiated having two friends spend the night to compensate me for this massive inconvenience. My friends and I were upstairs in my bedroom listening to Led Zeppelen 8-tracks and smoking Lisa’s mom’s pot that she brought with her for our own “pot luck”. As we laid on my waterbed looking up at my blacklight posters through the puffs of smoke, we began to hear laughter and water jets bubbling from the back patio which was directly under my bedroom window. We all poked our heads up to see about 10 naked “old” people standing about, waiting for their turn to get in the small fiberglass hot tub. My friends could not stop looking out the window and laughing hysterically, despite my begging them not to. Not to protect the nudists, of course, but to protect me from the humiliation of their laughter at the way we lived. I did not find it amusing at all and was really angry at my mom for … well, being my mom.
Their hot tub party went on for hours without a robe to be seen. We had the munchies and a brutal case of cottonmouth. We had run out of supplies in my room and there was only one thing left to do. We headed downstairs to hunt and gather survival food. We set off with a preplanned list: Three bottles of Pepsi, a bag of Ruffles potato chips, a heaping plate of ravioli casserole, and any dessert available.
As we crept down the shaggy carpeted stairs we could hear the laughter and party chatter from the dining room which was adjacent to a glass slider leading to the back patio. I could see the reflection of the naked herd of pink water buffalo standing around with little paper plates and plastic glasses of boxed wine. Just like any normal potluck, but with body hair and old dangling parts.
As we rounded the corner and came face-to-face with the naked old beasts, they were completely unashamed of standing there because THAT’S HOW NUDISTS ARE! Some of them knew me from church and Roger wanted to interrupt my survival mission to ask how school was going and, hey, how is the dancing coming along? When I get nervous, I get funny, so I cracked a joke. He thought I was uproariously funny, and he put his hands on his hips, tossed his head back, and laughed with gusto. I don’t need to tell you what I was seeing there, but I’ll add that it put a damper on my interest in boys for a while.
As I was answering his questions, trying really hard not to look at his penis, my friend was grabbing as much food as she could without making any eye contact with anyone. I grabbed the Pepsis and we flew up stairs to the sanctuary of my room where we remained for the duration of the evening. My friends were no longer insisting on looking out the window.
I swore that I’d never be like her. I’d be normal and blend in like beige wall paint. I would get married to a regular man and have two kids and stay married forever. We’d have parties with our clothes on. I would make regular food with at least four ingredients. And I would never ever embarrass MY kids.
I didn’t keep my vow. I’m twice divorced, and I have been known to make weird food. I’ve been referred to as “interesting” or “a character” no matter how hard I try to act beige and usual. I do embarrass my kids and most of the time take great pleasure in it. However, I do all those things with my clothes on. But I’m happy to hold the door for you.
