Happy
Holidays!
In this Issue:
Dates to Remember
January
- 14: Board meeting--Bylaws and Procedure Manual review
February
- 2-4: FANR board meeting, Gulf Coast Resort near Tampa
- 11: Board meeting--Bylaws and financial review
- 15-20: Midwinter Naturist Festival, Sunsport Gardens, Loxahatchee
March
- 11: ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP MEETING, Picnic, Election of officers, Organizational board meeting
- 23: Movies at FSU (?)
- 25: 12th Annual College Greek Athletic Meet (Rain date: April 1)
- 31: EVERYONE'S MEMBERSHIP EXPIRES
| Tallahassee Naturally is a non-profit
organization dedicated to the advancement of naturist recreation
in north Florida and nearby areas. The club is an affiliate
member of both the Naturist Society and the American
Association for Nude Recreation. Bare and Free is the official Newsletter of the Tallahassee Naturally Club. Articles appearing in Bare and Free may be reprinted by other naturist publications, provided that credit is given. Photos, however, may only be reprinted with written permission. Club members are encouraged to submit , articles news items, and photos for publication. Please address all submission to: Tallahassee Naturally, P.O. Box 6866, Tallahassee FL, 32314 or To the Editor, 502 Airport Drive, Tallahassee, FL, 32304 or smithj7@peoplepc.com. 
|
Christmas Banquet and Membership Meeting Dec. 10
Plan on bringing TWO passing dishes for the Christmas Banquet on Sunday, December 10. The club will provide roast chickens. Notice that we eat early at 1:00.
That is so we can have a brief membership meeting at 2:00. Two items are on the agenda: electing Bruce to fill a vacancy on the board, and discussion of our plan to discontinue our voice mail. (The inactive club member who has had it on her line all these years is going to a cell phone, so we need to do something different. Since more and more of our contacts come by Internet, we are thinking of directing the few remaining calls to a board member's house.)
The wind-breaking flanges on the building are out now, so sunbathing is still pleasant--even with temperatures in the sixties. If a fire is needed for the banquet, we will have one. Yet the weather has co-operated with us every year except last year.
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It's Been a Good Summer and Fall
Though attendance ran low this spring, lots of overnight camping through the summer and early fall boosted our totals a little higher than the last several years. And those campers have been working. Special thanks to Bob, Gene, and Bruce for cleaning up the old woodpile, and cutting enough dead trees to build a new one.
The club's twentieth anniversary was well attended. Wendy coordinated the biggest feast in all our history.
The Full-Moon Skinny-Dips have been popular all summer. The October swim set a record of 25 people attending. (We still kept the small-group intimacy because several carloads of people showed up after most folks had gone home. The two groups never did meet.) But all are talking about coming to our College Greek Athletic meet in the spring. We even arranged a second sinkhole tour to accommodate several students who were out of town when we did it the first time in August.
The Foley Follies Continue
Does the name Mark Foley sound familiar? Not only did his salacious communications with former congressional pages set off a political scandal, but this is the very same Representative Mark Foley who raised such a fuss three years ago about the FANR Youth Camp. (That was the same time as the most inappropriate messages.)
The AANR office has warned that we should not be too quick in screaming "hypocrite," for little has yet been proven, and we do not know where this investigation will lead. Already, Foley is trying to divert attention to his old priest who went skinny-dipping and to saunas. Foley is good at such tactics. We were aware at the time, that he created the youth-camp fuss to divert attention away from growing questions about his homosexuality.
Fortunately, some Florida clubs--especially South Florida Free Beaches--have made friends in the state legislature, so no trouble developed there. But anti-nude-youth-camp laws are now on the books in Texas and Virginia. In Texas, it was done by bureaucratic decree, so we may never be able to get in there and undo that damage. The Virginia law is under challenge, and is moving ever so slowly through the courts.
Two New Projects from the Naturist Society
The Naturist Society has sponsored two initiatives. The first is a new Roper Poll. It found that:
54% of Americans--a clear majority--now favor designating clothing-optional areas of public beaches.
74% believe people should be able to sunbathe nude in appropriate places without government harassment. (This number is down slightly from the last poll, but still in the same general range.)
24% of Americans believe backyard nudity should be legal, even if visible from the street. This is a question never polled before.
25% of Americans have skinny-dipped in mixed company. (No one has ever counted those who skinny-dipped alone or in same-sex groups.)
Late in the election season, naturists in Seattle began waving signs saying Nude Beaches YES. No such question was on any ballot, but the signs raised such interest, that a new and pretty informative web site was posted: http://www.NudeBeachesYES.org . Check it out.
Mid-Winter Naturist Festival Feb. 15-20
For the seventeenth year in a row, members of The Naturist Society sponsor the most jam-packed naturist event within a day's travel. Representatives of our club have attended every one of them, and have never been disappointed. You can find workshops on the latest trouble spots, yoga, photography, single people, massage, Florida beaches, or just about anything else. If you haven't been, you owe it to yourself to go.
Paul will again be leading four sessions: How to Attract College Students, Informing Politicians of Naturist Family Values, The Professors and Researchers Special Interest Group, and a slide show on Nude Youth in Art.
All of this takes place near Loxahatchee, west of Palm Beach. For more information, ask Paul for a brochure.