Whole Lotta Danglin'

In this line of business, you're forced to face down a lot of tough situations... fires, floods, hedgehogs... During my short time in The Biz, I thought that I'd seen it all and could handle any situation thrown my direction. Well, last weekend's assignment tested my nerves like no other, and I barely made it out with my sanity intact. It was more than any news photog should ever have to handle on the job, and since that day I have thanked the good lord for rescuing me from such a vile and dangerous situation.

Yes, I was assigned to cover an attempt at the Guiness World Record for largest skinny dip. 500+ naked folks crammed into a single pool, in conjunction with various other mass skinny dippings around the country. That's a whole lotta flesh (and a whole lotta blurry video).

Now, I certainly consider myself to be an open-minded individual, and I didn't think that something like this would be all that hard to handle... but as I came to find out, nudist colonies don't tend to attract the supermodel crowd as much as you might have thought, which makes for a whole lot of danglin' that I really didn't need to see on my Saturday morning.

I've certainly had my old man wanger quota filled for the year (which, by the way, was set at zero). At least now I can say that I've been through hell and back, and any other assignment should seem like a walk in the park... as long as it's not a nudist park.

Oh, and a quick side story- As I was shooting the story for the evening news, I slipped out my cell phone and grabbed a quick snap-shot for the ol' blog-o-sphere, and one of the promoters came over and got pissed at me. "Did you just take a cell phone picture?? You know, people notice stuff like that, and we don't need pictures like that showing up on the internet." This was told to me while I was holding a 25 pound camera on my shoulder, capturing video of these wiley folks to send throughout the country. But a blury cell phone picture? Forget about it. He insisted on watching as I deleted it. The story ran at 10 PM in market #20, and the video went out around the country to be used as prime kicker material. The photos used were taken from the video, so don't get your panties in a bunch. Oh wait, you're not wearing any...