Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 18 - 19

Chapter 18.

Crazy Salad.

William Yeats wrote in one of his poems:

It's certain all fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

He was a wise man.

Between our Starwood trip in 1999 and our trip out West in 2000, Henriette fell in love with a very pleasant man named Ab. He came out to visit Henriette and me in Australia after we got there. I liked him a lot.

Ab met Henriette because she rented a house belonging to his mother. He was 42, and he had three kids from a marriage which had gone furiously sour. Henriette was 24. This beautiful blond dropped, as it were, right out of the sky into his lap.

His wife was 42 as well, with a figure well worked over by three pregnancies. You can imagine how she felt about Henriette.

Ab worshipped Henriette. He was broad-minded and even willing to let her go on her travels. All he wanted was for her to be happy.

Then the rheumatism started. Henriette discovered that she could scarcely walk. She could only make about 200 yards before she got exhausted and too sore to go on.

She loved the redwoods, and the Anazasi ruins, and the Grand Canyon, but she could only see things that didn't require much walking.

Fortunately, when we got to Australia, Kai recommended a healer woman named Stella. Stella diagnosed Henriette and put her on a diet of tomatoes and toast. I was skeptical. How could a meagre diet fix a serious condition that defied modern medicine?

It worked. The diet soon fixed Henriette up. No more rheumatism.

I guess that was really my first warning, if I could have seen it as a warning.

Henriette really loved my new house, which had an enormous central room just perfect for parties and video shoots. She loved the warm weather.

We arrived in Australia in November, just when the weather in Holland is getting really cold, and the weather is Australia is starting summer. So she had fine days, plenty of editing to do, which she enjoyed, and the chance to go naked all day if she wanted.

Then her stomach started giving her trouble.

I went off one weekend to a nude beach carnival about 700 km away, and shot footage for Henriette to edit. It was a great weekend, and you can see the result in Freedom Weekends, one of the titles which Henriette edited for me. Freedom Weekends also contains footage of a beach carnival and a nudist resort called Sunseekers, both of which I visited in a trip to Western Australia.

When I arrived back, tired from a long day of driving, I found her in bed with stomach cramps. It was past midnight, but I bundled her into the car and we drove to the local hospital. They didn't know what to make of her, so we had to head off again to a larger hospital in a further town. They took her in, and I got back home around dawn.

They never did find out what was wrong, but Henriette felt better the next day and I brought her home.

I learned about this time that Henriette was raised in a very devout and strict Christian sect in Holland. They were so severe that they only had two ministers. No one else was holy enough in their eyes to qualify. One minister served the Amsterdam church and the other served the twenty small churches of the sect in small towns.

Henriette's mother was one of the stalwarts of this sect. She was very domineering. Henriette answered Robbert Broekstra's ad for nude models in a gesture of defiance. But defiance did not bring inner peace.

She started attending church with a passionate Byron Bay Christian group that had a three-hour service in the morning and another in the afternoon every Sunday, with a potluck in between. So she was away all day Sundays.

I went to a morning service once.

The minister came in and looked at us all solemnly for a few moments. Then he said,

"I was going to give the usual service, but I feel there is so much pain in this room. I want all of you who are in pain and misery to come forward to receive the blessing and healing of Christ Jesus."

Everyone gradually came forward, except Henriette and me. It might have been unanimous, I realized, if I hadn't been there.

The minister then put his hand on the forehead of each victim, slowly and in turn. After leaving his hand on their forehead for 15 - 30 seconds, he would give them a push. They fell backward into the arms of an assistant who would lower them to the ground.

Finally they were all lying there, with their feet to the minister and their heads outwards like spokes in a wheel.

Henriette and I stood at our seats watching. I felt uneasy to think there were so many unhappy people in Byron Bay -- which everybody says is one of the nicest places to live in Australia, which is one of the nicest countries in the world. People who were desperate enough to be attracted by this sort of ritual.

And Henriette was maybe one of them.

Yet we had lots of great times. Another model named Sue came along, and we went to the beach several times. The girls would go nude and run around and roll in the shallows with the waves breaking over their bodies.

Sue was more openly sexy than Henriette. She kneeled on the sand and poured oil slowly down her body and rubbed herself all over. I used that as the start of the shoot of both of them at the beach. You can see the results in Free & Wild 4: Girl Touch.

We did a wild party with a couple of other models and one guy that were friends of Sue's. She lay on a cloth on the floor and served as a living banquet. We put bits of food on her body and the models picked them off with their mouths.

Sue got really excited by the guy and I later learned she slept with him that night. The four of them danced wildly and did body painting on each other. You can see the party in Free & Wild 5: Girls Together.

Sue also modeled at the beach for Naked Yoga, as did the two girls at the party. The most exciting model for Naked Yoga, however, was Mona, the sensual girl in Free & Wild 3: Sensory Wonder.

I met her when I arranged a naked party with four models, two girls and two guys, at the home of some friends of mine. The two guys failed to show up, but the two girls brought along their friend Mona.

Mona is the girl I've already described in Chapter 14, doing the sexy shoot by candlelight. She was a true Dutch beauty like Henriette, tall and blond and shapely. She was great at yoga, and led the other two girls in a naked yoga session at the party. She was an amazing dancer too, and led the girls in a dance session and then danced alone. I shot more than half an hour of tape of her dancing alone. I just didn't want to stop.

Mona was truly sexy too. She talked about a girl who had put her whole life on the internet (this was 2000, and the internet was fairly new at the time), with a camera constantly viewing the girl "washing her hair, shaving her legs . . . everything!"   The girl was making a fortune.

Mona also talked about how she went naked a lot, especially at the beach. She obviously wanted to be on the internet too.

The three girls performed with hula hoops, went in the swimming pool, and posed for photos. It was a great party, and you can see the results in Party Night And Day. The day party in this video is a naked beach carnival at Samurai Beach near Newcastle, with hundreds of happy naked people.

The shoots with Mona were just part of a series of incidents that led me to believe that some girls are just as promiscuous, as eager for random sex, as men are. For some reason, women have accepted moral strictures about themselves, such as the ideas that being sexy or appearing to want lots of sex are somehow bad. But deep inside, women feel just as men feel: the more sex, the better.

Of course Mona was pretty sexy to start with. She was very beautiful, and was glad to show herself off as much as possible, given encouragement.

Chapter 19.

Henriette was equally happy to show herself off, and spent most of the day naked at home, learning how to edit videos on a special computer I bought for her.

In 2000 video editing programs were still in their infancy, and one company, Casablanca, made a computer that was specifically for editing. I bought one, along with a special enormous hard drive memory that was extra big and cost me an extra $1000. It held 17 gigabytes. Things have changed.

Mona brought along a friend called Rose, another expert in dance, and they modeled together with Henriette in my big new home. The gardeners had torn down a lot of lantana bushes (a noxious weed) and made a huge pile of it in a big flat open area in my yard behind the garage.  The three girls oiled each other one evening, and we set the lantana pile on fire and they danced around it.

It made a great shoot. The sinuous oiled bodies, the flames in the darkness, the smoke twirling upwards. I did a lot of shots across the fire so the girls were lighted full frontal, sexy and hot.

It was hard to keep my camera away from Mona, because she was the most sexy of the three, and the best dancer as well. But Henriette and Rose also vied in showing themselves off. This shoot is in Free & Wild 4: Girl Touch.

Mona loved almost any kind of activity, as long as she could be naked. She and Rose did some naked running in the great outdoors. I did a lot of shots of them from the back of my van, as Henriette drove slowly and the girls kept up behind.

At about the same time Les Rootsey, editor of Australian Sun & Health magazine, sponsored some naked fun runs at a resort near Brisbane called Sunshine Families. I did videos of the fun runs on two separate occasions, and between times I visited the resort to video kids running on slippery slides and playing in the pool, adults competing at pool, outdoor checkers, and archery, kids riding in the stage coach, and many other activities.

I put it all together, including Mona and Rose running along public roads, in a video called Running Out Of Clothes. It has always been one of my most popular titles.

I wondered what William Yeats would have thought of Mona. He certainly had the low-down on Henriette.

Henriette wanted to see some more of Australia, so I arranged for her to go on a tour up north, with visits to national parks and outback stations and diving at the Barrier Reef. The tour included diving lessons in a pool, and since it was off season, there were only four in the class. Then they went diving at the Reef, to a depth of ten metres at most. She was really happy there.

She got the bends.

They had to take her to Townsville, where there was a decompression chamber. She had to spend four hours a day in the chamber for a week. Well, at least it cured her.

I began to think Henriette had a problem. I had a theory. Watch out, here comes Doctor Freud!

Henriette had a domineering mother who was a very devout Christian in a narrow moralizing sect. Perhaps that was the trouble.

Henriette rebelled against her mother. That was why she became a nude model. She loved showing off her beautiful body for everyone to enjoy. But she also loved her mother. Going to the Christian group every Sunday was a way of expressing that.

The Church in Holland was the sort that was very suspicious of enjoying yourself. If you were enjoying yourself, it was almost certainly some form of sin.

So when Henriette was happy, when she was enjoying herself, she began to feel sinful and guilty. Modeling naked, of course, was the most sinful of all, but even a happy trip of sightseeing and diving brought out the fears and guilt.

So she got sick. That would make her miserable again, and hence not guilty. Being miserable helped make her happy.

That was my theory anyway. Or maybe it was just that, as Yeats said, being beautiful makes girls crazy. You figure it out.

I was really happy with Henriette. We had lots of great times, until she had to go back to Holland, back to Ab. I even went and visited them the next year, and we saw the wonderful DeltaWorks conservation project at the mouth of the Rhine.

She edited about three more videos for me, but gradually it took longer and longer for her to get anything done. She couldn't let Ab's wife know she was working on naked videos, lest the wife use that as an excuse for denying Ab's access to the children.

It was a painful situation.   After a year or two Henriette ran away from Ab.   She ran off with a woman this time. The woman was 42 and had 3 kids from a marriage which had gone sour.

I felt I was the lucky one.