The Right to Bare Breasts

It's hot.

So take off all your clothes... or at least the ones you can legally lose in public. A shirt, perhaps? As long as you're not dining at the Four Seasons, go for it! Guys in New York City do it all the time! And gals? Well...

Last summer -- which rivaled this one in its Al-Gore-foreshadowed, end-of-times heat -- I was walking on a Manhattan street when I noticed a naked back ahead of me. It appeared to be that of a petite, professional woman. Her shoulder-length, strawberry blonde hair was neatly cut and styled. She wore Capri pants, flats and a small purse over her left shoulder. But unless there were seashells or pasties on the other side, she was completely topless -- a fact that the hateful looks of passers-by from the other direction seemed to confirm. Now, the day was a scorcher. Doffing the top is logical, I thought. But is it legal? I didn't know. I also didn't know why I cared.

Come to think of it, why did anyone care? The man with the disdainful eyebrows, or the giggling gaggle of teens, or the woman of the hand-on-hip-superiority, dangling cigarette and grave eyes? No one could fathom the woman's shirtlessness as a right and/or choice, so instead, we all indulged in aggravated confusion. Did she have a costume malfunction on the way to work? (Corporate casual from the waist down, after all.) Were we witnessing a meltdown? Was she insane?

Then I changed the channel from confusion to curiosity. Was she a performance artist? An activist, perhaps? Maybe it's legal, I pondered, and we're all the fools! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! Yup, with this last thought I was right.

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