November Never Seen So Much Skin

Hometown boys strip down for a good cause...

T

his doesn't require much of an explanation, does it? Oh, all right. They just needed the money. What, with a new downtown Carmel location and all...

But seriously, they were'nt really naked, they didn't really need the money and it was all for a good cause.

"There are a couple of things I need to say about the photos below. First off, we're not really naked. Secondly, it was for a good cause. The first employee we hired at Homescapes was a woman named Patricia Hamilton. She left us in 1998 to open her own publishing company and when she asked us to be in her fund-raising calendar my first thought was 'you're out of your mind!' After all, I literally have a brother and sister who had never even seen me with my shirt's top button unbuttoned before, let alone quasi-nekkid.

But Patricia pointed out that she was exposing us for a good cause...promoting the Arts Habitat, a multicultural community of artists and art organizations being developed on the grounds of our closed army base, Ft. Ord. Anyway, all it cost us was our pride and a little public humiliation is good for the soul now and then (when it was featured on "Sixty Minutes II," Bill Geist made a comment about "a trend in calendars featuring flabby Americans" right before they cut to a photo from our calendar.) Luckily it wasn't the photo of us."

There's only so much humiliation I can take.

-Thompson Lange