Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (45 page)

casually dressed middle-aged and retired couples sip wine and dine on

prime rib and mahi mahi in the gourmet restaurant. In the center, a

piano player in Hawaiian shirt and slacks plays Billy Joel classics to

clothed couples sitting at high-top tables. A white-shirted bartender

pours drinks from behind a polished bar. All seems very mundane until

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a fat man at the bar spins around. He’s naked and his knees are spread.

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We spot Angye and her friend from New York between the high

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tops. She’s strikingly statuesque in an elegant, knee-length red dress.

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Only the fine lines around her blue eyes hint that she’s forty. Her waved

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blond hair frames her patrician features and flows just below her bare

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shoulders. Her neckline dips only to her clavicle. With mountainous

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breasts she doesn’t need cleavage to ooze sexuality.

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Her friend, a producer, has never been to a nudist resort before

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tonight. “He doesn’t have anything like this in his backyard,” she says.

He scans the crowd and says little. I’m not sure if this is due to person-

ality or awe.

Over dinner, Angye is in PR mode, showing her media savvy by

tossing out pop-culture terms and the type of quips that journalists

typically circle with stars. “They say what happens in Vegas stays in

Vegas. Here, we say what happens in Caliente never happened,” she

jokes between sips of a dirty martini. Then she plays off of Janet Jack-

son’s “accidental” nipple exposure during a Super Bowl halftime show:

“You don’t have to worry about wardrobe malfunctions here.” Amidst

it all, she tells me about the community, its population (half of whom

are seasonal), the multiple events, including the attempt and failure

at hosting the Lingerie Bowl during Super Bowl XLIII. Having traveled

to about seventy-five other nudist resorts and camps around the na-

tion, Angye has a handle on what makes Florida nudists different: a

freer, more playful spirit, better bodies, and, of course, deep, all-over

tans. She notes nudists in the Midwest tend to be heavier and not as

appearance-conscious.

Angye lives at a manic pace. She calls herself a “serial entrepreneur,”

having started more than thirty businesses from a restaurant to adver-

tising agencies. She says she got her real estate broker’s license at nine-

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teen. She’s a single mom and says her first priority is her nine-year-old

son, who’s had an online sports talk show since he was six. (“His voice

dropped early.”) Her social calendar is filled with charity events, school

functions, golf games, and Super Bowls. As she talks about teaching

eighth-graders how to write a business plan for America’s Teach-In, I

have to remind myself that this is a woman who paints with her breasts

and has a stripper pole in her bedroom.

She’s a little hesitant to talk about her physical transformation since

she’s been in Florida, perhaps because of her date. But I already know

from a
St.
Petersburg
Times
profile (which she confirmed as accurate)

that she hasn’t always been a sexpot. In fact, when she moved to Florida

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from Wisconsin, she didn’t wear makeup, dressed in slouchy sweaters,

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and sported a dishwater-blond mullet. “Business in the front and party

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in the back” she confesses to me. About ten years, two failed marriages,

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and a son later, she started changing her appearance—highlighting her

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hair, working out with a personal trainer, buying new clothes to show

off her newly sculpted figure, having surgery to lift her heavy breasts.

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She even changed her name from Angela Smits to Angye Fox. Even-

tually the transformation expanded to her bedroom, which took on a

bordello feel with red and black colors, a stripper pole, and the word

“Sex” emblazoned across a wall.

If she had stayed in Wisconsin, she doesn’t think she could have

found the new Angye. To her, Tampa is a “Euro city,” a place more ac-

cepting of various lifestyles. “There’s more tolerance here,” she says.

“Where I’m from, people tend to keep their blinders on.”

Angye got into nudism after a male friend coaxed her into joining

him at Paradise Lakes. She would save him money, he argued, since

nudist resorts typically charge single men more than couples in order

to discourage oglers. “I told him if we get there and there are perverts

staring at me and the floor’s all sticky, I’m going to leave.”

She discovered it wasn’t anything like that and found losing her

clothes liberating. She became a Caliente regular. In short order, her

business mind kicked in, and she set out to give the resort’s marketing

a makeover. Having her own ad agency, she talked the resort into let-

ting her be their spokesperson. A “lifestyler” as well, she saw the poten-

tial for the resort to grow by courting swingers, the ones with pockets.

As we talk, a black-haired young woman in a fishnet bodysuit and

platform shoes heads through the lobby toward the nightclub. A hint

proof

of what’s to come.

Angye says she stopped working for Caliente to pursue her
FoXXXy

Forum
Internet radio show, which the resort promotes. Following a

Howard Stern–style format, she and her cohost, a licensed sex thera-

pist, cover everything from buying a dildo to getting a tattoo. In one

episode, their audio booth is filled with sex toys and they give listen-

ers salient tips on how to introduce a vibrating glove in the bedroom.

Angye occasionally rings a bell for emphasis.

Older diners sitting behind us get up to leave. The shirted men,

whom we’d assumed were fully dressed, aren’t wearing pants. They pass

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our table exposed from the waist down, flaccid penises and all.

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“Did you see that?” Angye’s date asks.

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Angye laughs. “Once I invited an older couple to dinner and told

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them not to worry, that people usually dress for dinner. That night,

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people were nude at every table around us.”

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Eating naked does have its advantages, I point out. “You don’t have

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to worry about staining your clothes with wine or dropped food.”

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Being a man with protrusions at risk, Angye’s date fires back, “But

what if you drop a steak knife?”

James cringes.

Scaryoke

Before we hit the nightclub, Angye gives us a mini tour, leading us to a

balcony overlooking an expanse of pools, hot tubs, bars, and the lake-

front beach; it’s a mass of man-made water features that tops even the

largest area beach resorts. There are five pools in all, the most impres-

sive a massive one with islands and a towering waterfall. Two pools

with volleyball nets and a standard-size heated pool that’s only waist-

deep. They are empty. But on the upper deck where we begin, nude

men and women with imperfect middle-aged bodies sit in hot tubs and

around an S-shaped pool just wide enough to sit along its outer walls

without touching feet in the middle. It’s a little tough even for Angye

to concentrate on her PR pitch as a heavy woman facing us scissors her

legs in the water. “That woman is flashing us,” she says, seeming a little

embarrassed. I’m not sure if it’s because the woman’s exposing herself

or if it’s because she’s unattractive. Not the clientele the resort wants

to advertise.

proof

Beyond the waterfall pool, a Hank Williams Jr. tune spills from an

octagonal tiki bar. A live vocal is muffled by the plastic shades that pro-

tect the naked inside from the mild night chill.

Tonight is nude karaoke, or as Angye calls it, “Scaryoke.” She’s not

eager to show us inside, but we insist.

The crowd is sparse but lively. Everyone except us is nude. At the

microphone, a man who looks like he could be a retired colonel sings,

“Nobody wants to get drunk and get loud.” A few in the audience join

in as if to prove the lyrics wrong, “all my rowdy friends have settled

down.”

Singing solo in the nude before a crowd of other naked people has to

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be a humbling experience, which may explain why everyone in the bar

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seems to know one another.

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Angye is immediately recognized and greeted with warm hugs. One

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of her acquaintances, Michelle, stops dancing around the room only

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long enough to be introduced. Michelle’s in her thirties, less than 5

feet tall and stocky enough that James later good-heartedly refers to

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her as a nude gnome. Her escort hangs back, talking and laughing with

another man.

Angye introduces us to another friend called Catnip, not because

the woman has feline features, but because she wears strange necklaces

with chains that clasp each nipple. She’s also accessorizing with a short

fringe skirt that covers little more than her navel.

Catnip is a 24-7 nudist. She lives in a Caliente condo and makes her

living there as well. She creates jewelry and sells it by the pool. She says

she has no interest in expanding her business outside the resort.

A slim, cheerful, and deeply tanned woman in her fifties, Catnip

says she wasn’t always a nudist, and was a little apprehensive about it

when her husband introduced her to the culture. After divorcing him,

she moved from Chicago to Caliente to live naked full-time. “He didn’t

think I would stick with it when I left him,” she says of her ex-husband.

“I love it, and I love living here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

I never have to put my clothes on except to go to the grocery store. I

did have to get dressed and go to the dentist office the other day. It felt

weird.”

We end up getting into a long conversion about jewelry, one of my

passions. I quickly forget that she is nude and wearing a strange neck-

lace nipple contraption.

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Michelle is still dancing around the bar, belting out lyrics to a Joan

Jett song along with a karaoke singer. Then all at once, she bounces

over and gives me a chest bump, her naked breasts bouncing into my

clothed ones. Like a pinball bouncing from flipper to flipper, she imme-

diately does the same to James, leaving him wide-eyed and speechless.

By all means, it’s strange and shocking to get chest-bumped by a

nude woman, a stranger at that. But for some reason I find it hilari-

ous rather than offensive. I’m not even threatened that she bare-chest

bumped my husband. Perhaps it has a lot to do with her doing it in jest.

But I can’t help but wonder if I would have felt violated had she been

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clothed.

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While we are still catching our breath, Michelle coaxes Angye up to

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the microphone for a powerful and sexy rendition of Bonnie Raitt’s

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“Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About.” They miss a few notes but

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are smooth enough that it doesn’t hurt the ears. They sway close to-

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gether, Michelle throwing her arms in the air and around Angye, cast-

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ing an aura of bisexuality.

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Angye’s date, meanwhile, hangs solemnly by the bar, giving no hint

that he’s impressed or aroused.

I would be content to spend the rest of the evening among these

happy people rather than hit the swinger nightclub inside, but Angye’s

tour isn’t over.

Nite at the Fiesta

The Fiesta nightclub is packed, and the sexuality crackles like a downed

power line. Hundreds of people mingle, drink cocktails, and dance to

the fast, heavy beat of techno music. Unlike those in the pool and hot

tubs, most of these revelers are under forty with trim bodies that bear

more resemblance to the resort’s glossy ads.

With few exceptions, the men are fully clothed in shorts or jeans

and shirts. Most women wear only enough plumage to sexualize their

bodies. Some are in mere string, others topless with slinky skirts short

enough to reveal they aren’t wearing panties. A few are quite creative:

One woman wears only a skirt of long, colorful balloons; another sports

a bikini made of Native American dream catchers, the holes circling her

nipples and butt crack.

It’s a little ironic that people put on clothes to go to a nudist resort’s

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nightclub. Especially since many make an argument that nudism isn’t

about sex. But even textile nightclubs are hookup spots for singles. So

by nature of the venue, everyone wants to look sexy. And if you’ve seen

nude bodies all day, perhaps it takes some degree of clothing, or at least

accessories, to remind others what those parts are for.

The hedonistic scene is a lot to take in. A giant screen flashes videos

to the heavy beat of the music. A handful of young women dance and

grind on the stage. On the dance floor couples in their forties move to-

gether, men in clothes and women in stripper wear, a bizarre juxtaposi-

tion. Meanwhile, a lone grinning Asian man wearing only fluorescent