My friend Molly had a bath and then went running through the house, trailing suds and puddles, yelling, “I’m naked! I’m naked!”, exhilerated to be at that meeting point of the naughty and the natural. She was only 3.
Stephen Vogler’s equally exhilerating ride through Whistler’s underbelly, Only in Whistler, also got the ‘too naughty’ nod this week, with BC Ferries admitting that the cover was not family friendly enough for them to stock it.
Stephen Vogler has always been an anti-establishment kind of guy. Not in a lock-up-your-children kind of way… more of a ooh-he-just-asked-a-question-that-is-making-the-gentry-here-squirm-in-their-starched-pants. After all, the man drives a converted school bus with enough letters peeled away to dub it the “C OOL BUS”, has his own soapbox, and was vocal in protesting the “deforestation’ of the lot that will now house the Celebration/Medals Plaza in Whistler.
That unique and uncensored voice (in the face of vigilant cops with video cameras) is the reason Harbour Publishing chose him to pen two books about Whistler. After all BC Ferries’ concern about the naughtiness of bare bums strikes at the heart of an age-old tension in Whistler – between the free spirited and the straighter-laced, the boho-ski-bum and the investor, the early squatter and the indignant member of the “Alta Lake Ratepayers Assocation” who kept having their toilet paper nicked by freeloading ferals. (And that was in the days before Costco.)
Enter the Olympics (TM) painting another layer of whitewash on the community, and the question arises: Will the RMOW be enacting a by-law to prevent streaking? Why not celebrate Whistler’s proud history of nudity? It doesn’t cost a thing.
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