Dear Betsy,
Are you sitting down? My next book is Naked Old Ladies! Right, you say, send me a proposal, a sample chapter, a marketing analysis. But all you need are those three superior words-naked, old, and ladies. (I think the serial comma belongs in here, but your call.)
I have been incubating this fab concept for twenty years, ever since I first attended Ladies Day at the Northwest Denver neighborhood Jewish steam bath. This 1920s relic featured cracked white tile, metal gym lockers, a full deli serving pastrami with a side of cubed red Jello, and Mrs. Gertie Hyman, proprietress, who told us that shvitzing was “very aerobic” and urged us to take in more calories. This was easy because we all walked around draped in a sheet, with no zippers or waistbands to constrict us. You could get a $17 massage in a room that smelled of the cigars left over from Mens Day. You could get a shmeiss, which I found out a little too late was a large naked woman hitting me with scrub oak branches on the top shelf of the sauna. You could run into your friends and compare shower clogs. But mostly, and overwhelmingly, the experience was about naked old ladies who had been shvitzing since they were naked young women.
I have a habit of writing about people and their items. Who needs an outline when your subject is willing talk at length about, say, every retro Big Wheels in his collection? It was in this spirit that I longed to approach the old ladies. Tell me about this body you’ve lived in all these decades, I would say. We could all learn something. Meanwhile, a very congenial photographer would take excellent, respectful, coffee-table-type portraits. (Not Annie Leibowitz. I don’t think she likes me. Not Mary Ellen Mark. She is not respectful.)
Until now, I was scared to march up to naked old ladies and ask them to bare their bodies and thus, their souls! for my benefit, even though I sense they’d get something out of it, too. But no more! As it happens, I’m well on my way to naked old ladyhood myself, and by the time I get there, I want to make sure we have a big following.
Deal? Deal! Let’s do (clothed) lunch!
Robin
One Comment
Waaaaah! You just made me SO NOSTALGIC for Gertie and the Lake Baths and yes, even the schmeiss, or at least… remember the soap scrub? Not to mention that in those days of permasnot sinuses that was the only place in Denver where I could breathe. I’m sighing a great big gusty nostalgic sigh right now, oh yes I am.
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