The silly season
This is the summer silly season. When newspapers headline stories about those Regina women who shed their upper garments in public as a blow for women’s liberation, you can detect the silly season is here.
In summer, readers have more social distractions than they can handle with fairs, slow-pitch tournaments, fish derbies, barbecues, trail rides and beach parties. How do you get them to read newspapers? You headline a story about people making a clean breast of things.
I suspect the Regina incident had more to do with attention-seeking than constitutional rights. It could be categorized along with wearing purple dreadlocks or a diamond stud in your belly button.
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If this garment-shedding catches on, think what a setback this will be for sales at Zellers, Walmart, Sears and all those other fine Canadian clothing purveyors. Perhaps that was their motivation for sending out their fall and winter catalogues at the end of June. They know that no one is going to go around bare-busted once colder weather sets in.
Since 98 percent of us are not built like the classic carvings of Greek gods and goddesses we wear clothing in summer and winter designed to make us look better than we really do. Beach wear discloses the knock knees, pot bellies, long necks, flabby arms, operation scars, corns and bunions and hairy legs that won’t get most of us jobs as models for McCall’s magazine.
Maybe public nudity will catch on but I’m not looking forward to the day. Anyway, silly headlines about a silly subject did create economic activity by selling some newspapers.
