Skinny Dipping is All American

"When you shed your clothes," say the folks at the American Association for Nude Recreation (www.AANR.com), "you shed the stresses of every day life." So this July 10, AANR is encouraging the public to de-stress by participating in one of the summer's most all-American events, the 2nd Annual Guinness World Records™ "Skinny-Dip Across North America."

All-American you ask? The AANR informs that skinny-dipping was once very common in the U.S. Among other notable Americans, Ben Franklin and Presidents John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt are perhaps the best-known skinny-dippers. Throughout our nation's history, in rural America young boys and girls have swum with youthful abandon in secluded ponds and swimming holes, as was immortalized in Norman Rockwell's No Swimming illustration. In fact, though little remembered, before the YMCA began to admit females in the early 1960s, swimming trunks were not even allowed in the pools, citing the impracticality of clogging pools' filtration systems with lint fibers and soap residue from swimsuits. And culturally, the skinny-dip has been part of such family-friendly movies as Oklahoma! and On Golden Pond, among dozens of other mainstream films.

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