Hillbilly Teeth on LVB

Some of you may remember and the librarian after which it was named—an article that was so academic, so ya know, erudite, that I’m awaiting a citation from the Smithsonian any day now. But along the way, as I researched the history of our famous nudist (or in more politically correct terms “naturist”) beach, I came across some juicy anecdotes.

A few favorites:

My sister, Cindy, was living here in the mid ‘90s, working at Windemere, and one of her co-Windys invited her for a day at Lucy Vincent. I hope I’m not giving away family secrets when I tell you that Cindy has a knockout figure. In the family gene pool, she got the curves, I got the . . .  hmmm, when I was little I could do one-handed cartwheels? Does that count?

So she was up for the outing but ignorant of naturist beach etiquette, fearful of being hit on in such a potentially carnal vicinity. (I gather that, in actuality, if nudist beach flirting is done at all, it’s so discrete as to make a poker face stare resemble Harpo Marx mugging for the camera.) But all the same, Cindy was prepared to ward off inappropriate hitters. 

She sat, luscious and sun-blocked and utterly naked in her beach chair, grooving to Dookie by the punk group Green Day that plonked from a nearby boom box. Her friend offered her a chicken salad sandwich, which required Cindy to remove her temporary dental bridge. Some years ago, she’d lost her front teeth in a car accident and now needed new implants. The bridge was designed to tide her over for a few weeks.

A couple of guys approached, flashed smiles and said “hello.” Forgetting about the bridge being out, Cindy grinned back with her hillbilly mouth, and the guys slowly slunk away. She realized she’d found the perfect method for discouraging unwonted attention.

Another time, back in the ‘60s when the place was so rockin’ they called it Jungle Beach, an old friend of mine was making out with his girlfriend in the bushes halfway up to . You may recall that the Secretary of Defense from the Nixon administration lived high on the cliffs overlooking Lucy Vincent Beach. He hated the nudists even more, judging by letters to the paper and litigation he considered, than he’d once despised the Viet Cong. (It was rumored that, in a closed session of a Chilmark selectmen meeting, Secretary McNamara proposed bombing the beach because he still loved the smell of napalm in the morning.)

I kid the long-gone secretary.

But back to the lascivious make-out session, which is really where we all wish to re-direct our focus, am I right? Suddenly they heard a woman’s voice­—possibly McNamara’s daughter—from the rickety wooden steps.

“Hey! You two! Stop that!”

They ignored her and continued as if a porno film director had not yet called “Cut!”

“Do you HEAR me?!”

Of course they heard her, but what else could they do but stay calm and carry on, as the Brits used to mutter under stiff upper lips during the Blitz?

“I’m calling the police!”

She started back up the steps. The lovers exchanged conspiratorial smiles. It would take her 10 minutes to return to the house, another 20 to explain the situation to the cop at the desk, and four-and-a-half hours for the officers to arrive at the scene of the crime, if they arrived at all.

In 10 or so minutes, the lovers blended back with the other naturists and plunged into the ocean to wash off the dirt from the McNamara bluffs.

My last story involves my beloved ex-husband, comedy writer Marty Nadler, who should have demanded in our divorce settlement a prohibition against writing about him. I can’t help it: He’s the mother lode of the world’s juiciest stories.

This too was back in the ‘60s, when Nadler came up here every summer with his theatre troupe, the Vineyard Players from Ithaca College, to put on shows in Oak Bluffs. Since Marty rarely won big roles—he was invariably cast as a waiter—he was given the daytime assignment of donning a sandwich board with advertisements for that night’s performance painted in bold letters on each side.

Well, Nadler took full advantage of this assignment. He marched up and down Circuit Avenue and the Main Streets of Vineyard Haven and Edgartown. But his job always provided him with an ideal opportunity to visit some of his favorite beaches, including Lucy Vincent, where he shucked off his clothes, but still enjoyed some privacy from the sandwich board—a sort of a loincloth on steroids. He’d hail all his buddies, they’d promise to come to the show, mostly to see Marty uttering his two lines as the waiter.

In the meantime he acquired a sandwich-board tan, something to which not a lot of people can lay claim.