Nudist Cruise

by Hailey McPherson

  There was a time when the sight of naked people massaging other naked people would have made me wonder when the happy ending was coming, but it all looked very innocent in this atmosphere. There was even a little girl, maybe ten years old, getting a massage. I don’t know how tense ten year old muscles can possibly be. Maybe it’s all that strain from texting her friends all day, but she seemed to like it.

  The mud was from the Dead Sea. I have been told that their mud is supposed to be more therapeutic than regular mud. I don’t know anything about that. I had some mud put on me in an expensive spa once. I never noticed any difference.

  Some of the passengers were getting coated in mud and sitting out in the sun to let it dry. That is where I found Earl and Edna. When I walked up to them getting caked in mud, it occurred to me that this was the first time that I had seen them naked. Our day in Hong Kong was fully clothed the entire time. Earl was not as chubby as I imagined he would be and Edna’s breasts looked surprisingly young for her age. Maybe it was all the mud.

  “You should try some,” Earl said to me while a young woman rubbed mud all over his naked body.

  “It’s great for your skin,” Edna added. “Not that you need it.”

  Edna was always complimenting me. I could never tell if she was just being nice or if that is what happens when you hit forty and meet people half your age.

  I could not see any reason why I should not, so I let a woman rub mud on me. She started with my shoulders and back. For some reason, I thought the mud would be warm, but it was a little cold. She worked her way down to my stomach and legs. Since I was wearing a bikini, she skipped the covered parts.

  “Do you want to do your face?” she asked me. “It has proteins and minerals that are good for your skin.”

  With all the protein Liam is always trying to put on my face, I should have perfect skin by now.

  Earl and Edna were completely covered head to toe in mud. Only their eyes, lips and the tops of their heads were exposed. They were quite visibly the type of people who like to dive in head first.

  I am not. I like to dip my toe in the water to see how it feels. Since this mud was completely new to me, I did not want any on my face. I had no idea how my skin might react and this was not the time or place to find out the hard way. I was blessed with a good complexion throughout my teenage years, but lotions and creams that are new to me can still cause minor problems to this day.

  “It’s very firming,” Edna said to me, looking at the total absence of mud on my bikini top. “You don’t need it now, but you will some day. Believe me.”

  Looking at her mud covered breasts, I chose to believe her. I decided there was no time like the present and took off my bikini top.

  “Mud me up,” I told the mud lady.

  Despite all my naked dreams and late night naked wandering around the ship, I was fairly nervous about taking off my top. The pool deck was far from empty. There were people all over the place. Any of them could have seen my exposed breasts. The thing of it was, no one cared. They were all naked themselves and, as nudists, they see naked breasts all the time.

  My girls were covered in mud about a second later anyway. I was naked, or at least topless, but I did not feel naked. The mud was like a protective coating that kept me safe from whatever psychological Iago in my head was making me feel danger in the first place.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” Earl said, looking at my bikini bottoms.

  One day in Hong Kong and he was taking on British expressions.

  Being topless was one thing, but being completely naked, especially in front of Earl and Edna, was not something I had ever considered before now.

  “How firm do I really need to be?” I asked.

  “It’s great for your bottom,” Edna told me.

  I don’t doubt that when I get older I am going to have a flabby butt, but at this point in my life do I really need to firm it up with mud? I’m a dancer, so I give my butt a better workout than most people. I actually have a pretty good butt, if I do say so myself.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I thought to myself and dropped my bikini bottoms.

  I was completely naked for all the world to see. The entire world was not on the cruise ship, but I felt as if they were. In reality, only Earl, Edna and the mud lady were looking at me, and I was facing away from Earl, so all he saw was my bare dancer’s butt.

  Once I was covered from neck to toe in mud, I had three choices. Some people were getting wrapped in hot towels and lying down on the massage tables. This seemed like the most modest choice since my naked body could be completely covered.

  Some people were standing out in the sun and letting the mud dry. We were all coated in mud in the shade, but a short walk away was plenty of direct sunlight. Once dry, the gray mud turned white.

  The third option was to just stand in the shade and let the mud do its thing. This was Earl and Edna’s preference. So I chose to stand with them and we all talked about life on the Mississippi and being innocents abroad as if we were not completely naked and covered in mud.

  Earl told me about another passenger who bought an iPhone in Hong Kong.

  “As soon as he started playing around with it in his cabin, it fell apart,” Earl told me. “By then it was too late to return it.”

  I laughed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That’s not really funny. But when you buy something for half of what it’s worth, what do you expect?”

  “I guess he thought he was getting a good deal,” Earl said.

  “That’s exactly what they prey on,” I told him. “Tourists who think everything in Hong Kong will be half the price for some reason. Even if he had returned it, there’s no way he was getting his money back.”

  “How could any business afford to sell something for half of what it’s worth?” Edna asked.

  “Exactly,” I said. “They’d go out of business their first day.”

  After a while, I completely forgot about how naked I was. The mud almost felt like I was wearing tight fitting clothes anyway. I still had to stop myself from looking at Earl’s muddy penis, though. It was pointing out the whole time. Not from arousal, but because it was one of those little penises that can’t really hang down when the scrotum is bunched up, from all that mud, I suppose. It was always obvious to me that he and Edna were naked.

  I figured as long as I was already naked, I might as well go swimming, but I could not very well go in the pool covered with mud. Taking the mud off would only leave me completely exposed.

  You can’t keep mud on your body forever and we eventually hosed ourselves off. As soon as I was clean, I wrapped my towel around my naked body. Earl and Edna stayed uncovered and let themselves air dry.

  “It doesn’t make any difference now, dear,” Edna said to me.

  I did not even think about it. Putting the towel around me was more of a reflex action than trying to cover myself.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I know you’re right.”

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Earl told me. “If you’re more comfortable in a towel or bathing suit or whatever, that’s up to you.”

  “That’s right,” Edna agreed. “But how did you feel with the mud?”

  “Muddy,” I joked.

  I was not entirely sure how I felt about all of this. Just being on a giant cruise ship sailing off the coast of Vietnam was surreal enough. All the nudity made it seem more like a dream than something that was really happening. Except that if it were a dream, I would drop the towel and jump into the pool. So that is what I did.

  I have gone swimming naked only a few times in my life. One of those times was on the cruise ship in the exercise pools, but no one could see me there.

  In the main swimming pool, I was surrounded by people. There were more than a few naked people near the edge of the pool. All they had to do was look at me and they could tell I was naked. There were a few naked people in the pool. I could tell that they were nak
ed, so I had to assume that they could tell I was naked.

  People were bobbing their heads underwater in the course of their pool activities. All they had to do was open their eyes and they would see all of me.

  While I was swimming naked, I thought about why it felt so strange to swim naked. It did not feel bad physically. The water to skin contact felt wonderful. All of my problems with nudity are in my head. Obviously it is not appropriate all the time. You don’t have dinner at the White House naked. But there are times that it is entirely appropriate, like when you are on a nudist cruise. What I was trying to get past was my deep seated conditioning that all nudity was bad all the time. I seemed to be ok with it physically. It was the mental part that was a challenge.

  I have been a dancer and singer for years. I’m just starting to get into acting. One of my big rules is that I will not do nude scenes. It’s not about being seen naked. I just don’t want to be used or typecast as the bouncing bimbo. If it is a nude scene that Meryl Streep would do then it might be acceptable. As acting barometers go, she is not a bad choice.

  Liam always wants to take naked pictures of me, but I will never let him. Again, it is not about being seen naked. He has seen me naked plenty of times. Pictures like that would be bad for my career.

  “Plenty of actresses got famous from leaked nudes,” he likes to say to me.

  “Yes, but those are not the kind of actresses I want to be,” I say.

  Nude pictures and “stolen” sex tapes worked wonders for the careers of people like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Pamela Anderson, but those are not the kind of women I admire. I want to be more like Jodie Foster, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn. I don’t think any of them ever did a spread in Playboy. I certainly don’t remember any Audrey Hepburn sex tape.

  I once walked out of an audition when they told me the part I was up for involved full frontal nudity while singing a song. The character was supposed to be singing at an orgy, for some reason. Everybody was going to be naked and they wanted me to stand there naked and watch while I sang a song. It sounded pretty stupid to me.

  In this giant cruise ship’s swimming pool, I was supposed to be on vacation, so I forced myself to stop thinking about work. I still had nudity on my mind, though.

  The first thing I did when I got out of the pool was wrap my towel around my body. It was another reflex action, but I was also very aware that I was completely naked. People could tell that I was naked inside the pool, but standing next to it, they could all see more of me than I was ready to display. Earl and Edna could stand there naked all day. Very brief glimpses of me naked were my limit.

  Chapter 20: Naked Matinee

  Since I had a late breakfast, I was not hungry when everyone else was having lunch. After my swim and mud adventure, I was ready to eat. I went back to my cabin to put something on. I was not ready to eat naked yet. I could not even walk back to my cabin naked. I put my bikini back on when I was on the pool deck. I was not naked, but even walking around the ship in a bikini was bolder than usual for me.

  I went to one of the Chinese restaurants because I knew that Liam would never want to go there. He is sick and tired of Chinese food since he eats it every day, but in Hong Kong I have more variety than he does. I also happen to like Chinese food.

  The Chinese restaurant on the ship was not as good as American Chinese food. It was more authentic, but nothing like what you get from the tiny street stalls in China. It was more like the big fancy restaurants that charge far too much for the simplest meals. On the cruise, it was all free. It was actually included in the ticket price, so it was not really free for most people. Since I did not pay for my ticket, it was free to me.

  After my late lunch, I went back to the cabin to get dressed for Liam’s afternoon show. While I was changing, I thought about where I was and where I was going. I knew that most if not all of the audience would be naked. There was no reason I could not be naked too, other than my dying from embarrassment. My natural reaction is to dress appropriately for the theater, but on this cruise, being naked was appropriate.

  I thought about the pros and cons of going to Liam’s show naked. Pro – I knew the afternoon show would be less crowded than the evening show. Con – whoever was there would still see me naked. Pro – seeing me naked would blow Liam’s mind. Con – if Liam called me up on stage, I would have to run out of the theater screaming. Pro – the house lights are low during the show and you can’t see the audience very well anyway. Con – I would be sitting there naked.

  I was still worried about being seen naked, but plenty of people already saw me naked that afternoon. It’s like Lindsay Lohan trying to stop naked paparazzi pictures of her from being published. Everybody has already seen everything anyway. The funny thing is, it never made any difference, to Lindsay or to me. People saw me naked and then what happened? Nothing. I did not die from embarrassment. The ship did not sink. The Earth has yet to explode. I even went to lunch and not a single person came up to me and pointed or laughed.

  I decided to go to Liam’s show naked. I was still not ready to walk around the ship naked, so I covered myself with my sarong on the way from the cabin to the theater. It was only after I sat down that I took off the sarong.

  Just walking around in the sarong made me nervous. It covered everything, but if you were close enough, you could see through some of it. Of course, no one walked up to me and put their face up against my body to see if they could glimpse anything. I was more exposed in my head than I was on this ship. That is, until I took off the sarong. Then I was as exposed as everybody else.

  Everyone in the audience was naked and they were all sitting on towels. None of the towels matched the decor of the theater, but I don’t think whoever designed the place envisioned a bunch of naked people watching the shows anyway. I was sitting on my sarong, so I suppose I did not breach nudist towel etiquette. If I did, no one said anything to me.

  There was a different show every day, but what Liam was in were mostly Las Vegas song and dance routines. He would sing a song or two with other performers and he would have a solo. Other performers had solos and there were other songs without him. The production and the songs were different every day, but it was all basically the same format.

  There were other shows on the ship that had nothing to do with Liam. There were at least two magicians, a psychic mind reader type show and some “headliners” who were no one I had ever heard of, but I did not see most of those. Someone told me that they usually have a topless dance show on the ship, but they did not bother with that one on the nudist cruise. I guess nudists don’t get too excited about seeing a topless woman on stage.

  When Liam first came out, he was with other performers and the stage was flooded with lights. I knew from experience that he would not be able to see the audience. The lights were lower during his first solo and he walked around the stage and sang his song while trying not to look at anyone in the audience. I could tell that he was trying not to stare at any naked bodies. When he looked over at me and saw that I was naked, he blurted out a quick “holy shit”. It really did not fit in well with the song. I laughed, but I could not tell if anyone else in the audience realized what was going on. The look on Liam’s face was priceless.

  He knew better than to call me up on stage this time. Being naked in the audience is one thing, but if I had to stand naked in front of everyone and sing a song, I would have killed Liam, and he knew it.

  After the show, I covered myself back up with the sarong and walked around the ship a little. I wanted to see how comfortable I could be walking around in just a sarong. I had my naked walk earlier, but that was in the middle of the night when I only saw one couple. This was in the early evening when there was a shipload of people walking around. I knew the sarong was not coming off this time.

  I made it all the way back to the cabin and did not feel that relief I felt after my naked walk earlier. When you have been naked on the pool deck, walking around in a sarong is simply not dang
erous. Others could tell that I was completely naked under the sarong, but at this point it almost felt the same as walking around with clothes on.

  When Liam came back to the cabin, there was only one thing on his mind.

  “You were naked,” he said to me, astonished.

  I already knew about that. I was there.

  “How did you do it?” he asked.

  “I took off my clothes,” I told him.

  He still could not believe it. He saw it with his own yes, but it was still hard to comprehend. I thought it was a little out of the ordinary myself.

  “All this time I’ve been trying to get you to open up, to explore, and then suddenly you’re just sitting there naked in the audience.” He was still pretty amazed. “That’s so hot.”

  The nudists on the ship went out of their way to explain to me how nudity is not about sex. I saw firsthand how right they were and experienced my own nudity in a completely asexual environment. I felt a lot of things while I was naked. Aroused was not one of them.

  Yet one of Liam’s first thoughts was “that’s so hot”. He could not see the personal liberation or the wholesome enjoyment of nature. He did not see the unencumbered rejection of unnatural fabrics that are unnecessary for safety or warmth. All he saw was his girlfriend sitting naked in the audience.

  “And it got me so hard,” he added.

  I was very aware that our views of nudism were going to be very different from this point on. I went from seeing nudists as a bunch of hippie weirdos to a diverse group of people who appreciate the connection between mankind and the natural world. He sees nudism as an excuse to look at naked chicks.

  “Well, yeah,” he says. “As long as they’re hot.”

  I don’t know if working on the ship left him disconnected from the other passengers or if I was simply more open to something new at this point in my life. I definitely got more out of the experience than he did. Then again, I came into it expecting nothing, other than a free cruise. He boarded the ship expecting wall to wall naked supermodels. The worst thing that could have happened for me was that the nudists confirmed my preconceived ideas of them. There was no way Liam was not going to be disappointed.