My friend Val left me a message the other day to tell me that her middle child asked her "what was the most dressed-DOWN you've ever had to be?" Meaning, the opposite of being dressed UP.

The best answer Val could think of was when she and I sought out a nude beach in Cinque Terre, Italy in 2004. The beach was very private and we had to walk half a mile through a dark, creepy out-of-service railroad tunnel reminiscent of the one in Ghostbusters 2. We had to climb down a steep cliff to get to the beach, which was sparsely peopled by quiet  sunbathers, all keeping their distance from each other. I think there was one very old lady, and the rest were older men. Older than us, anyway.

The moment Val and I took our suits off and laid down on our towels, the men who were there casually opened their flip phones and inched (centimetered, this being Europe) closer to us, while seeming to be distracted by whomever they were texting.

Turns out they weren't texting, they were taking hellaciously low-quality photos with some of the first phone cameras that existed - I didn't know anyone with a camera on their phone, so I had no idea what they were doing!

Somewhere, on some phone in some landfill, is very pixelated photo of me and Val in our twenties with our clothes off on a beach in Italy.

(Luckily, we overheard someone at the train station who'd been to the nude bach, advising someone "if you see a guy covered in mud approaching you, tell him NO! He's trying to give you a mud massage. He understands 'no.'" We did indeed get approached by MudMan, and told him no, and he contentedly walked away, wearing his mudmask.)

Here's the original, which was already in color, and the chaser, which Laeluu recolored!