Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
Dating Advice From . . . Engineers by Steph Auteri Q. For optimal functionality, what should go into a first-date emergency kit? A. Fine wine, road flares, a snake-bite kit and Ghirardelli chocolates.
At first, everyone was enthusiastic about my Naked Party. People were coming from L.A., Chicago, New York, Atlanta . . . even Paris! But on the morning of the party, my phone began ringing: aunts of the invitees started dying, someone's car insurance suddenly lapsed and it would be too dangerous to drive without it.
At ten p.m., I was the only naked person in my house. Dave unbuttoned his shirt, then buttoned it back up. "You're breaking the rules!" I said, outraged and helpless.
A knock came. Dave and I screamed. I threw on a robe and grabbed a couple of vodka jello jigglers, per the plan: guests would be plied with alcohol at the door and immediately stripped. I shoved Dave into the kitchen with the warning that if he wasn't naked when I came back, he'd . . . well, he'd wish he was. The first guests were Rick and Emily. There was giggling and arguing — "Emily will not take off her panties!" Rick tattled. They sent me back to the kitchen for more jigglers.
There I discovered a cowering, fully clothed Dave. "Take 'em off," I hissed. I was a roomful of drunk southern men at a club with a reluctant stripper on stage. I heard Rick walking into the living room, and I somehow managed to rip Dave's pants down to his ankles and his shirt open to his wrists in one movement.
Rick was much more pleasant naked than I'd imagined. He always wears loose clothes, so I never knew what might be under there, but his body is like his face: friendly. He grew up in Alaska, so his skin all over is fair and undamaged, like a behind.
Emily stuck her head and one shoulder around the door of the room, but wouldn't enter further. "I'm doing it like getting in the pool," she said. Like many of the extraordinarily beautiful, Emily does things to make herself less attractive. She dyes her blond hair dark, making it look like she has no eyebrows; she sits in corners and hides her face behind hands and hair and books.
When at last she entered the room, she was clutching a sock monkey over her privates! She scurried to the couch and put a potted plant in her lap. Dave was holding his knees to his chest on a floor pillow opposite me. I said, "Dave, I can see your thing!" Actually I couldn't, he had his limbs folded up so tight, but everyone laughed and Dave turned purple.
Laura and Albert were the next arrivals, and after the initial awkwardness (and jello jigglers) we were just six naked people, hanging out listening to a Fabio CD, talking about being naked. Laura and Emily kept saying supposedly complimentary but actually bizarre things about my body. They said they loved the way the skin on my stomach folded when I bent forward, instead of rolls of fat . . . but no one really wants to think about their skin folding. They said I had a "National Geographic butt," and seemed a little angry about the shape of my breasts. "They're engineered," I explained, feeling like a puppy who'd peed on the carpet. "Boob job." They wondered if my breasts were hard, I told them to feel. They did, and then we were all friends again.
Jon came next. He was arrested for stalking, though he claims he's innocent. But who would admit to that? Jon is quite tall, scarecrowy and, I learned that night, quite hung, too. Right behind him was Light Rachel. (The Rachel I always write about, my best friend, is Dark Rachel. She'd
rather be dead than naked.) We call Light Rachel the Dirty Librarian because she's super quiet but then does things like show up at a Naked Party. Currently she's dating a sea captain. I suspect something between her and Jon The Stalker too, given the silent but meaningful way they always seem to end up near each other.
This is what I love about small towns: the inhabitants possess a weirdness specially developed. The weird-o's don't find each other here until it's too late . . . we've already mutated in isolation. In a city, they find each other early and glide into a niche. There are no niches for the depraved in Dover. We have to dig our own.
We remembered other crazy things we've done. "This one guy would lock me in the car and make me listen to Ozzy Osbourne's 'Crazy Train' over and over again," Emily said, "and then I'd get revenge."
"Yeah!" I said, "When you're twelve or thirteen, you do stuff like that. Then it just all stops. I wish someone would lock me in the car with 'Crazy Train' now! My friend and I streaked through a Masonic Temple one night and had all these psychic occurrences. I think it was because our perceptions were heightened with discomfort. Don't you feel really alert right now?" Everyone seemed to agree, though no one looked like they thought alert was necessarily a good thing.
Just then, three gross guys crashed the party. They were hyenas disturbing the buffalo herd: waving their wieners everywhere, throwing food. Emily did a pen tattoo on one of the gross guy's arms, and he got this raging boner, which is fine, but then he waved it in Emily's face and mine! He had on boots and a skull cap and nothing else. Wearing boots when you're naked makes you look like a pedophile. He spilled things on my carpet for an hour or so, then came over to where Laura and I were conversing on the couch and started pulling on his limp pud. Inches from our faces! "Stop that right now!" Laura demanded.
"It's a naked party, what do you expect?" Boots whined.
"I don't even expect that on a naked date. And quit throwing food," Laura added. "It's wasteful."
"It's not wasteful . . . that guy eats it."
That Guy got on his hands and knees to gobble Cheezits off the carpet. My eyes met Dave's (who still hadn't moved a muscle) over the upraised, hairy butt, and I got the feeling it was going to be a long time before either of us was going to be in the mood.
"All right, everybody," I announced, "my kid's coming home at dawn, clear out. I gotta disinfect." Putting our clothes back on turned out to be even more embarrassing than taking them off. We returned to our normal selves and just wanted to get away from the people who had seen more than that.
My step-mom brought Wolfgang home, and I got good and coffeed and said, "Let's go on a spy mission." Wolf and I stalked the garbage man all over town. We were hiding behind trees and telephone poles and cars as we watched him heave those bags into the truck. He wasn't afraid of even the leakiest bags. What a man. The difference between him and the party crashers is that he was doing a job. He was sober and grim and the moon lingered even as the sun came up, and just once as he leapt out of the big, rust-colored truck in an eloquent arc to within an inch of the cans, he was dissected by both a moonbeam and a ray of sun, or so it seemed to me and Wolf, peeping from between two slats of a falling-down fence. Of course, for Wolfgang it was purely warlike, but for me — I think he knew we were tracking him — it was such flirting! One time I even heard him grunt, and I wondered if he did it on purpose, for me. His face was the same brick color as his truck, and his hair was black. Spying my quarry's stained pants and straining muscles through parted leaves was about five billion times sexier than my experiment in group nudity, and I was already thinking of rolling a pair of Dave's pants around in the mud then dressing him up. I guess it's true, you can take the girl out of the trailer park . . .
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
