My Year of Being Naked

I turned 63 this year. How can this be? In my mind, I’m perpetually 30. When I was 30, my innocent look and ageless skin meant I’d still get carded. I was living like a free spirit—taking weird jobs . . . standing buck naked in the middle of a room full of clothed people. Really.

My joke to myself was that every morning I got up, had breakfast, then got undressed to go to work. I was a young actor, and, burnt out from a part-time job that had turned into a mountain of hours with humongous responsibility, I decided that for my next “straight” job I wanted as little work as possible. Although I was deeply modest—I didn’t even walk around naked in my apartment—modeling for the Art Students League fit my job specs.

As an actor, I was used to taking risks. Yes, I had stage fright, but I also had a secret “fuck-it” switch in my brain.” I’d flick the fuck-it switch as I stepped on stage in a play and spoke my first lines, or when I walked into an audition filled with frowning, scary people, or in “trust exercises” when I fell backwards from the top of bleachers into the arms of my theater student classmates. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I’d ask myself. Die? Okay, fuck-it and plunge! It was exhilarating—like a near-death experience but without the risk.

The first time I took off my robe in front of a room full of artists, it was pretty weird for the first few minutes but then something amazing happened. I realized people were liking my irregular figure, my big breasts, my belly that I’d tried to starve away in high school. They liked the fact that I looked like a real human being . . .  and that felt nice. Stark naked, admired, valued, with literally everything hanging out, I was safer than I’d ever felt in my life. Nobody was going to grab me; nobody even knew my name. 

Then came the peace—hours and hours that today I would call “meditation.” There is virtual silence in art classes, so from the time I took the first pose, I went into a trance. 

“What do you think about?” artists would ask me later. 

“Music,” I’d answer. 

Sometimes I’d play whole symphonies in my head. Sometimes phrases of music would repeat on a loop. Sometimes I’d daydream. Sometimes there was nothing—a state of blissful, open-ended nothingness. 

“You didn’t move at all,” somebody would inevitably gasp at the end of an hour-long pose. “How do you do that?” I’d smile demurely and shrug.

The secret was that I didn’t care. There was no possibility of anything being wrong in that “don’t-care” place. There were no problems, no insecurities, no fears.

In sketch classes where you did six ten-minute poses, artists liked the fact that I would act out scenarios—each pose a storyboard frame of a drama that only I knew. I’d get so involved that sometimes I’d end up with my legs spread in such a way that, had I seen it, I would have cringed. But in the don’t-care place, I was fine . . . because I wasn’t me. I was an explorer climbing mountains and slithering through jungles. I was a Homo sapien advancing from birth to old age to death. I was the whole darned family of man.

And then there was the power. There is an intoxicating power to being admired and untouchable. Some girls—pretty girls—learn about that early, but that had not been my road. I was the pretty girl’s best friend, the girl who wasn’t asked to dance at mixers, the girl who didn’t have a date until college. But naked on a platform, I was a goddess. Through my half-closed eyes (so that I could see out but nobody else could see in), I would see men react as I dropped my robe—their bodies suddenly coming to attention as they looked and sketched and looked and painted. They were respectful and shy in their admiration, and that made me brave. And my comfort with myself made everybody happy.

During a year when I couldn’t get a bit part as an actor, I was getting the equivalent of standing ovations every night in sketch classes. I became so popular that people fought to get into my classes. People asked me to work privately. I did painters’ clubs and design studios. I was so confident that I took one questionable job for a weird man in an even weirder cluttered loft with no windows (don’t ever do that).

How many teachers had written on my grade school report cards, “Betsy is very smart, but she has a tendency to daydream”? Little did they know that this would one day be a professional talent. For one year, my ability to tune out and be still was valued—and I made money.

I can’t remember why I stopped. In the years that followed, every now and then I’d run into somebody from the Art Students League who’d seen me pose. As he stared at me, confused, I’d query “You don’t recognize me with my clothes on?” Or I’d receive a call asking if I wanted to work. “I’m not doing that anymore,” I’d say; “I got tired of being naked.” But the truth is I was just done with it. I’d learned what I’d needed to learn.

And now as I settle into age 63 . . . it’s much easier, due to the magical transformation that took place during my year of being naked! Yes, my chin is droopy, my arm and leg skin sags, and I’m really not thrilled about my eye pouches, but I look like a real woman. I look like a person who’s lasted! The confidence that the naked year gave me is alive and perky. Plus, at 63, I have the flexibility of time travel with a broad perspective. So as I look at my droopy butt and loosening neck, I flash back to sketch class: Gee, I looked good, I think, seeing myself on the platform. A whole lot better than I realized at the time. And then I project to a future: Yes, there’s the 80-year-old me. I see her clearly standing in front of the mirror, remembering now. She shakes her head in amusement and admiration. “Not bad,” she says. “Not bad!”

"My Year of Being Naked" was first published on "RewireMe.com" in 2014.

Betsy Robinson is a novelist, journalist, and playwright. Her latest novel is The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, published by Black Lawrence Press as winner of their Big Moose Prize. Click here for more information.

MY CREATIVE PROCESS

Can you tell us a little about the origins of "My Year of Being Naked" and why you wrote it?
Like a lot of my work, an early version of "My Year of Being Naked" was written decades before it was published. The current version came about when I was 63 and finally had figured out what it was about. It's hard to remember my original inspiration, but I think I just thought it was interesting and funny to spend my days naked as an artists' model in order to make money: I'd get up, get washed and dressed, go to work, and get naked. I found naked modeling one of the most interesting of the many jobs I did to make money when I was trying to work as an actor. I wrote a short story about it, completely different from this essay, called "Pose, Please" (Silo Magazine, 1993; Girl Stories & Game Plays: an anthology of stories and plays, iUniverse, 2005).

It took many years to realize all the benefits of this job and I think they congealed into words after I hit age 60. I realized how comfortable I was with my body and how I looked, and as I watched the culture explode with messages about anti-aging and young beauty, I thought, "Bullshit." I didn't feel that way at all—and still don't at age 67.

RewireMe.com seemed to be a place that would be open to an expression of this, so I revised the very old essay, sent it, and they told me the traffic exploded on publication. I suspect this is due to the title, "My Year of Being Naked," which was a mercenary impulse. I know nudity sells so I slapped it on the essay and hoped people would read it. They did. RewireMe even included it in their "best of" ebook.

Why write?
My first experience of being "Me"—and I mean that in a profound "who I really am" sense—was when I wrote my first little story in the sixth grade. And I continued to have this sense of deep okay-ness and excitement every time I wrote anything—a composition, a story, a joke newspaper that I composed on lined paper with many carbon copies that I distributed to my siblings and parents. 

My parents were pretty hands-off, so we grew up feral, but I always knew that my father thought reading was a good thing, and since I loved reading, that made me feel good. My mother was a writer (I actually edited and posthumously published in 2015 her novel, The Trouble with the Truth (Simon & Schuster/Atria/Infinite Words), which she wrote ca. 1959 and was never able to publish. For more information on that, see http://www.betsyrobinson-writer.com/events.htm#.Wn7cw-dG0l0), but she never shared that with me when I was a child. In fact, she seemed closed and guarded about it. All I knew was that she sat in her study typing with an intensity that, at the time, I interpreted as anger. Now I would call it deep concentration that required she not have three kids running around demanding her attention.

I read anything in my parents' library that had quotation marks because I liked talking. I read James Baldwin before I had any idea what he was writing about. I read all of O. Henry's stories after bedtime, burning my blankets with the reading lamp. I read Salinger—oh, his dialogue—which I have reread many times over the years. I fell in love with Walter Farley's Black Stallion and Island Stallion series and bought each volume as soon as it came out. I read books that at the time I believed were great literature, only to discover, when I investigated them later as a professional writer, that they were not very good. But so be it; they fed my need at the time.

I never said I was a writer. I just wrote. But an English teacher in eighth grade addressed me as "Writer" when he saw me in the hall, and my heart exploded.

In college I took a couple of writing courses but was turned off by what struck me as snobbish, mean-spirited criticism by classmates, one of whom authoritatively told me that I should stick to acting (I was a drama major). I think my knowledge that I am writer was stronger than anything anyone—classmates, removed parents, or all the thousands of people who have rejected my work—has ever said. I know what happens to me in a writing state and so I write. I would like all my work published and loved by the masses, but I write even though that hasn't happened. For some years I made my living as a journalist, and when I lost my staff job, the first thing I did—without a blip—was write a novel that had been gestating for the previous year, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg. Writing it was pure joy. Why would I ever give that up?

What or who influenced you in your writing?
Many of the answers to these questions are in the previous answer, so I'll concentrate on what I haven't said yet.

I was a feral child and have continued on kind of a loner path which has suited me, even with its lack of encouragement by outside sources. I came to New York City in 1972, managing to graduate from college in absentia by sending in reports from all the people I worked with as an actor and also writing some short stories, under the auspices of a wonderful teacher who I never took a class with but who somehow became my in absentia supervisor, Josephine Carson Rider. I will be forever grateful to her. The fact that I have a B.A. is meaningless to me, but has been important to people who have hired me, so I'm glad I got it.

I worked as an actor for more than a decade and during that time I was simultaneously writing short stories that nobody published and plays that began to get high-exposure productions of readings. (I consider playwriting the Marines of writing. One must learn structure, dialogue, action, and economy within the form's constraints, and those things have served me well in journalism, fiction writing, and even in public relations and advertising writing.)

I never liked school and classes, so after fleeing college, I stayed away from them. I have learned and continue to grow by reading, by practicing, by getting one-on-one criticism from people I trust, by making a lot of mistakes, by becoming a professional editor (again, learning on the job) and learning to focus that insightful "editor's eye" on my own work after it has reached a certain level. Actually, I think this is the most valuable asset I have—the ability to read as an editor, see like an architect, and be a very good structural mechanic. And I think this is a skill that many people can learn and probably the most valuable one to teach students. Nobody can teach anybody how to write. But you can learn to see as an editor, to think mechanically and artistically; the notion that these things are contradictory or mutually exclusive is a myth. One can be equally right- and left-brained with practice.

I have never taught, but I do work as a freelance editor, and I believe my clients learn from seeing my revisions in track changes. In fact, I know they do. I've seen them mature and learn to write through the process.

But appreciating literature is just as important as writing it, and I suspect school can be very good for that—exposing students to great writers. And I applaud anyone who takes that path. 

However school is not the only path to appreciation and learning. The playwright August Wilson was a colleague of mine the summer we both had plays produced at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, and I remember his reading (we all had to read our plays out loud in a pre-conference weekend) of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. He was simultaneously raw and graceful with a voice that was his alone, and I soon learned that he'd been working as a cook and was a product of self-education at the public library. So there are many ways to learn. I am biased toward self-education as it has been my choice as well. School can result in an ingrown sound for writers, even creating bad habits in the process of encouraging original voices. (I stopped reading a book by one well-known writer/teacher when I hit the line "Unique your language.") Groups tend to fall into a groupspeak; it's simply their nature. So whether or not a student is in school, I would encourage them to read and think independently.

That said, school can establish contacts and, if one is mature enough to benefit from the experience (which I certainly was not during my student days), pave a way into a career in writing and teaching, and I would encourage anybody who has an affinity for school to do it that way.

Writers and books that inspire me are:
John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever—his vocabulary wakes up my own.
John Williams, Stoner—I have read it three times; it is a perfect book in my opinion and can be studied for structure, economy, and narrative that almost magically makes time move while still engaging the reader's empathy for the characters.
Percival Everett's books—they are all different and examples of skydiving into literature.
Ian McEwan's books—narrative, narrative, amazing narrative.
Mary Lawson's books—simple conveyance of complicated, iconic (think Shakespeare) nuanced human dynamics, great dialogue and sense of place.
Eudora Welty's stories—humor, authenticity, music, story.

What other art forms and disciplines interest you? For you, what makes literature distinct from all other art forms?
I love all other art forms. I listen to all kinds of music. I love art; I don't go to museums, but maybe one of these days I will; I'm lazy about going anywhere outside my neighborhood.

Literature and reading it (not listening to audiobooks) is, in my opinion, second only to music, the most immediate way to alter how you feel and think and who you are. When you read a well-written true (in the sense that Hemingway meant when he referred to writing "true sentences") fiction, you are rewired. You can have experiences you may never have had in your normal life. You may alter your outlook on life and other people. Literature can be the equivalent of brain and therefore heart surgery. In a direct words-on-page to brain process, with no interpreting intermediary, it changes you.

What are your plans for the future and the importance of the Humanities?
My most recent novel is The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg and I would love to discuss it with people who have read it. It is a funny book about a woman who believes she has not been given the respect and adoration she deserves. It's a book that pokes some people—they see in Zelda qualities that they loathe. And some people love it. There is a lot to talk about. 

I hope and believe nothing can kill literature. It is too important to too many people, although not the masses. I am concerned that, due to technology, people are losing the sense that writing well (including spelling, punctuation, etc.) is important. Even as technology expands our reach to each other, it also seems to be causing a deadly kind of artistic contraction and lack of awareness of the value of skill and quality. The notions that writing is a community process or that running a manuscript through an editing software can make it acceptable are absurd.

Creativity is life. Creating well is living well. And there are no shortcuts to creating well; it requires learning, care, and steadfast effort and practice.