Earlier this month, I wrote kind of a tongue-in-cheek piece about ratings for blogs currently in production on The Daily Gazette’s electric newspaper.

They were mostly gags, comparing our writers’ daily diaries to television shows. The analogy was not all that far-fetched: writers become producers, directors, head writers and stars of many pieces offered to readers. And yeah, we get weekly ratings reports here at the plant.
In that June 4 story, a fellow from the Terra Cotta Inn in Palm Springs, Calif., was nice to enough to offer some advice. I had been contemplating a return trip to the Berkshire Vista nudist resort in nearby Hancock, Mass., — I wrote a detailed account about a visit to this fun, friendly place in 1999 — to boost ratings.

The Terra Cotta guy — Tom — has a Google alert for nudist resorts on the Internet. He wandered into my “ratings game” entry.
“If you want your blog to become more popular, you will have to get more links to it from other blogs,” he wrote.
“If you don’t want to go back to the nudist resort you visited a number of years ago (obviously you did not visit our nudist resort, The Terra Cotta Inn in Palm Springs) you can write about our blog, a nudist blog instead.”
The Terra Cotta man said he has many guests from New York — including Schenectady — stopping in and stripping down.
Tom tossed my blog entry on his blog in California, so my new friends on the West Coast and other points in the nudist community are now on the “Type A to Z” bandwagon. I’m going to need them for that letter-writing campaign to save the show.

Anyway, because Tom seems like such a good sport and was nice enough to boost the blog, I’m now steering folks who appreciate clothing-optional resorts over to the Terra Cotta. I’ve caught a few pictures of the place on the Terra Cotta Inn Web site, and it looks like a swell place!

I’ve never been to Palm Springs, but if I ever visit, I’m going over for a swim and a Coors non-alcohol beer!

I hope I didn’t give Tom and readers of his nudist blog the wrong idea: I wasn’t really goofing on clothing-optional life when I said I was thinking of launching another nudes story. My point was that people like to read things out of the ordinary, and most people I know have never visited a nudist camp or resort.
“Nudist resorts like ours aren’t ‘edgy,’” Tom said. “We are a very nice boutique nude resort which is why Los Angeles Magazine picked us as one of their four favorite hotels in all Palm Springs.”
All the more reason for a road trip. I like the place already.

Actually, my experience with the nudist lifestyle was a day in journalism I will always remember. In the Berkshire Vista yard, there were probably 100 people swimming, sunning, playing tennis, sitting at the bar, just having fun on a sunny summer day.

The toughest part was “joining” the community. At one point, you had to throw your tennis shorts, Hanes shorts and T-shirt into the trunk and walk among the people. Everyone was in the flesh, in the raw, in the open air.

But you really got used to the whole scene pretty quickly. I met a woman who also was trying a day without clothes for the first time, and we had a normal, pleasant conversation in the nude. I took a shower outdoors, and a brunette woman with a great smile stepped into the shower next to me. “Hi!” she said.

Everyone was friendly, nobody seemed uptight about the surroundings or the scenery. I just had to be careful in the pool. I didn’t want to swim into anybody. Or any body.

I know most people will never try the thread-free lifestyle, but it’s not that big a deal. It’s really not that much different than skinny dipping. And that’s why I’ll be completely comfortable when I try out the Terra Cotta swimming pool one of these days.
Hope Tom has a whirlpool out there someplace.