"I see naked people!"

Anyone read about the Brattleboro VT kids who are pissing people off by doing everything that teenagers do in a town, but doing it naked?

The focus is the nudity, although according to the Boston Globe story, nudity is legal (or at least not illegal) in their town as it is in many towns in VT. What's really going on? These young people are engaging in a venerable tradition - finding new and creative ways to piss people off. I guess they caught a couple of live ones this time.

Andrew Wdowiak, who works at Everyone's Books, said that he's not put off by the nudity, but that the act has become a little tired. ``I think it was more for the shock value," he said. ``They weren't flagrant about it."

But last week, when about a half-dozen naked teenagers congregated outside the store, ``it was like they were baking a cake, and they really frosted it," Wdowiak said. ``All the men were naked, and the women were topless. I needed about three drinks to erase that vision."

One patron of the bookstore let loose with hysterics of Academy Award proportions, he added.

Abstracting away from the nudity for a moment, this is very similar to the behavior I remember engaging in as a teen. We had one or two friends with toxic colored hair cut sculpted into fun, pokey, non-suburban shapes. That group was made up mostly of post-punk fashion decay types. For fun, we'd go into the city and pose for bus and trolley loads of tourists who inevitably craned their necks taking pictures of the "strange Boston people" while we made faces, flipped them off, and pantomimed sex acts on each other and nearby objects.

My favorite halloween was the time I went downtown with a (different) group of friends to fuck around. The evening included a few failed attempts at trick or treating in non-local neighborhoods, resulting in angry adults whose vocal outrage at our socially incorrect behavior was sweeter than any candy imaginable. The night ended with a donut and condiment fight in the parking lot across the street from the 7-11, between The Golden Bowl chinese restaurant and Mr. Donut. I was largely intoxicant free until college but I still really enjoyed big obvious public displays of idiocy from 13 on (and felt a genuine sense of accomplishment when adults hissed to one another that we were all probably using drugs).

The thing is that this exact kind of shit is the best kind of shit for most kids. Possibly all kids and what differs is just the how, when, and wheres of it.

What sort of sparkly popping cycle of energy does this kind of behavior generate and feed off which makes it so damned appealing? A couple of key characteristics come to mind.
1 - the more public the behavior, the more rewarding it is
2 - it involves perverting convention (which is a deeply satisfying way to rattle people and/or say fuck you to the man when you're a teen)
3 - there's an emphasis on details of wardrobe, of props (balloons, snakes, ink, safetypins, skateboards, glowsticks, hairstyle....etc), of soundtrack (music, noisy cars). I guess you could call these things accessories to the people and the event. The accessories are very important and without them there is no event or not much special about it. Also, my sense is they are important because otherwise there is an emphasis on direct, immediate, and uncloaked verbal self expression and that, I think, frightens and/or intimidates most people.

Regarding the accessories, I think it may well be a defining property of teens to be able to innovate culturally relevant accessories out of whatever is around though. A menu at a restaurant, for example, is redefined as a prop and script in the loud poetry reading that has sprung up while the group waits for their pancakes. What sets it off? Dunno. Could be lots of things. In general, individual human nature in our modern western US (counter) cultural context. Oh and my guess is that Brattleboro is fucking boring as fuck if you're between the ages of 12 and 23.

Here, let's see what's going on in Brattleboro:
This Friday at 8:00, folks can enjoy The Stairwell Sisters - "San Francisco’s all-gal, urban, old-time stringband is cutting a new figure in traditional music, with a deep and rowdy repertoire of timeless tunes plus a solid standing of smart, original material."
Oh yeah. Old time string band music is truly the ideal medium for the existential condundrum which characterizes most adolescent spirits.

"Embodying the Divine Feminine GODDESS CAMP! $30 - $150
A weekend immersion or take 2 hour sessions or full day... Join us in this immersion to express the Goddess within through belly dance, mythic costuming and play. The Goddess Dancing™ comes from Boston to lead us in the Sacred Shapes™ and a dance of Mythic Feminine Archetypes."
They fucking trademarked "Goddess Dancing" and "Sacred Shapes"? WTF?

There's more but those two are almost fully representative. I'm NOT saying this means there's no town sponsored or condoned venue for this set of young people. There might be, it just isn't on the chamber of commerce page. What I am saying is that from my very limited perspective, it looks like the kind of town where the adults put a premium on having a wide vareity of community oriented and cultural events which results in their feeling confused and hurt when their slightly older kids stop finding the Raccoon Wilderness Adventures Program a legitimate way to spend their summers. A whole lot of this kind of confused and hurt parent feelings can build up in a family and even in a community such that normal changes in expressive and recreational taste can be seen as betrayal. Betrayal is bad, we like to avoid bad things and bad feelings, so it's not a stretch to conjecture that in Brattleboro kids who yearn for something other than an all ages community center drama class might end up a bit marginalized.

Hence naked sunbathing in the parking lot at the focal center of the adult world - the bustling center of commerce that is downtown Brattleboro (yes, I am being just a little sarcastic. I've been to Brattleboro).

So what should the beleaguered grown ups of Brattleboro do? Debate whether or not nudity is a basic human right? I guess, I mean, that's what it looks like is going on. But I don't think this is the real core of the issue. The core is how are they going to stop the kids from using nudity as the newest provocative prop in the big drama of life, and if they try to what new and exciting thing will these young people do in response? Would they prefer that the kids take up arson and meth instead of nude hoola hooping contests?

I don't advocate carte blanche for adolescent behavior, really I don't. I'm definitely not an anarchist. I'm not even a libertarian. I think though that in most cases, it is best to view this sort of thing as performance art - try to enjoy what is enjoyable and take seriously what is disturbing. In the practical sense, I think there is not too much to worry about. As soon as enough 30-60 year olds come out in solidarity for the naked thing, as soon as tourists start showing up specifically to witness through the cracks in their eye shuttering fingers the frolicksome free nudity, possibly even before the first "Naked Parking Lot" postcard or T shirt is printed, trademarked and sold at the next GoddessFest, I predict it will lose the sparkly allure for most of the teens who created this little interesting piece of social art.