My friend Hakima has a dilemma. She's been invited to a nude beach, but doesn't want to get naked.

Personally, I love nude beaches. Well actually, I've never been to a nude beach, but I like them in principle. Mostly because I love to get naked. When I was married, we had an annual tradition, called, appropriately, Naked Day. It was easy to celebrate. You simply never put clothes on all day long. You lounged all day long, naked. Watching baseball on TV? Naked. Vaccuming the apartment? Naked. Order take out Chinese? You'd better answer the door naked. I think this should become a national holiday.

The only problem with National Naked Day, as I see it, is that I'd have to look at a lot of ugly naked people. That, and it would make serving customers hot food a lot more dicey. And we'd have to suspend all those "no shirt, no shoes, no service" laws, although this poses an interesting theoretical question: if someone comes in with a shirt and no shoes, but no pants, can I serve them?

The only experience I had with nude beaches was through my father. My step mother purchased a trip for the two of them for my father's birthday. He was turning 50, and she wanted to give him a trip to remember, so she took him to Monaco. After he came back, he developed his photos. This was in the day when cameras used something called "film" and you brought this "film" to a developer to have the pictures "developed." It was all very primitive.

So anyway, I was looking through the photos of his trip. Museum, museum, castle, statue, museum, naked woman, naked woman, naked woman.... Fully 80 percent of his pictures were of topless sunbathers on the beaches of Monaco. I learned something important that day. My father was a pervert. Oh, and that women in Monaco have great taa-taas.

I think Hakima's reticence stems from her inability to separate nudity from sexuality. I can appreciate her dilemma, since I think sex is the best reason to be naked in the first place. I remember reading an article once that claimed people who visit nude beaches, especially men, don't sexualize the experience because they're too busy trying not to have boners. This seems like circular logic to me. They're not having sexual thoughts because they're trying too hard not to have sexual thoughts. I don't believe it. I had ten sexual thoughts writing that sentence, for chrissakes.

I think this subject deserves more research on my part. If anyone needs me, I'll be at the nude beach.