Natural's Not In It

Now that the weather is finally hinting at springtime, you start running into loads of people at the playgrounds in the neighborhood. On Sunday, we accidentally crashed the end of my son's friend's birthday party (girls only, so he wasn't invited) in the park. Yet, the girls swarmed around him like bees on fruit salad at a picnic, and he was invited to the remainder of the party at their apartment nearby.

When I dropped by to pick my son up, his friend's father, who is a pretty amazing artist, started showing me all of the different portraits he had done of his family and friends in paint or charcoal. In their living room was a rather prominent and realistic portrait of his wife, nude and very pregnant, and he's telling me all about it, blah, blah, she's naked. I'm no prude, now, and am all for depicting the human body in all sorts of artwork. You want to paint, sculpt, photograph, draw naked men and women, go for it. More power to ya. Still, the woman is in the flesh not five feet from me and I see her all the time at school and in the playground, and I just don't need this much information about her body in my head. So, I'm doing all I can not to look.

Later, as I was recounting my attempts at not looking to my wife (and she's seen the painting herself, too), our son found it pretty funny, but we also talked about how art students end up studying the human body, and how some people pose nude for the art students so they can make drawings of them, etc. So, later that night, being the ham that he is, my son strips down in our living room and starts striking all of these wacky poses and declaring that he's going to be a nude model for an art school. I tell him that he has to wait until he is grown up and then he can do that if he chooses. As the naked modelling continues, I joke that he should have a little fig leaf drawn over his privates. Being the creative little lad he is, he then places a blue Post It Note over his privates and does a little dance.

Bless him.