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It was during a meal that my younger brother suddenly began stripping. (He was 3 and I was 10.) My daddy jokingly told him, "This is not a nudist colony we're running."

Immediately I wanted to know what a nudist colony was. My daddy explained that it is a place where people gather to not wear clothes. I was amazed. He went on to say that one operated a couple of hundred miles south of us. As I tried to imagine the scene, he added that there was a movement to do something about it.

"Do you mean," I gasped, "that they're coming out into the streets?"

It would be nice to say that was when I became a subversive free spirit, assuming that personal choices are private unless they affect other people. I could claim that, in that moment, an academic was born, like when the child in a Whitman poem becomes a poet. Actually, the subject of undressing makes me think more of a day when I was 12.

It happened in the girls' dressing room after P.E. class. I was cowering, partly behind the door to my locker, trying to change clothes without revealing the fact that I did not have a bra. (That was before the days of bra-burning. In junior high a bra was proof of being grown up, even for a 12-year-old with the shape of a child.) My mother - probably not understanding that we all undressed in a herd - insisted that I was too young to wear a bra.

Standing there exposed was humiliating enough, without having to endure the "in crowd" of girls. They held all of the class offices except for the ones their male counterparts had. Years later I would learn that the class officers had all been to the "in" elementary school.

As I stood there groping to keep my chest covered and to get dressed at the same time, the "in" girls were giggling and whispering secrets. The one whispering would lean forward to show off her lacy bra. Suddenly, with a front-buttoning blouse halfway on and the bare side of my chest turned toward the locker, I vowed to replace the in-crowd.

It took me five years. Probably it didn't hurt that, in my junior year in high school, a football player asked me for a date and did not show up. Apparently his friends on the team knew. Anywhere they saw me - like in the lunch line - they shrieked in sort of a cat-call, "Tricia, Tricia." Then, in the same cat-call voice, they shrieked the name of the one who had stood me up. Always shy, I found being singled out in the middle of a crowd as humiliating as being without a bra when I was 12.

Still, everybody learned my name. The following fall, I was elected treasurer of the senior class.

- Pat Gardner

Pat Gardner, a retired academic, lives with her husband and their half-spaniel dog Baggins. She enjoys meeting outrageous people in places like grocery stores.