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Flying back from Jamaica to New York, in less than three and a half hours I went from nude, waited on and warm, to overdressed, ignored and freezing. It was an effort to put on clothes in Braco. It was equally hard to take them off once I returned to White Plains. From 85 degrees and sunny, to 1 degree with a wind chill factor of minus seven, it began to snow the moment our plane touched down at Kennedy and it didn’t stop until almost 24 hours later. The day before I was lying on the beach under a palm tree. Now I was shoveling snow from a porch in West Chester County. Where before I was sipping Piña Coladas and cooling off with multiple dips in the Caribbean, now I was drinking bad coffee and doing jumping jacks to keep warm. No one was calling me “madam” anymore or asking me if there was anything I wanted. Instead, people I didn’t know were yelling at me to get my ass in gear.  

There is a big difference in attitude between Jamaicans and New Yorkers, and it starts shortly after take off in Montego Bay, when you are forced to listen to fellow passengers complain about all the things that went wrong during their stay on the island. I personally don’t have a single complaint about my vacation, with the exception that I truly believe God invented clothes for a reason other than just keeping warm. Some people should never take their underwear off, it’s a simple as that. Forced (well not really forced, but wanting to fit in) to mingle with the nude and unclothed at the all inclusive resort my friends had brought me to, I did my best not to be too judgmental. 

But I gotta confess, it’s not easy to remain neutral about these things when male appendages and female breasts are swinging around haphazardly in front of you. What was particularly weird was to see women who from the rib cage up looked to be in their 40s, but from the bellybutton down were definitely not a day under 60.  

I had my doubts about this nudist thing before I left the tarmac at Kennedy. But my friends had outfitted me with “cruise wear” and told me to shut up and relax. Cruise wear is what you don when you go to the clothing side of the resort. You basically look like an Easter basket, all pink, yellow, green and blue. I had borrowed an outfit that morphed me into a walking palm tree, and another that I was told would make me look like “old money from Palm Beach,” but what I really resembled was a hard boiled egg dyed a rosy pink and lime green. Maybe there was a reason I should remove my clothes. 

I got used to the nudity after awhile. I even found myself participating in aqua aerobics, sans clothes though I was never tempted to play volleyball, croquet or dominoes with my fellow sun worshippers. Most of the time I curled up in a tiny ball under thick resort towels and hoped that the sun would disappear behind a cloud for a moment so that I could cool off, but it never did. And when I returned to New York, I wished for just the opposite: that the snow clouds would go away and that the sun would beam down and heat things up.  

It’s so hard to get what you really want, which is maybe why going on vacation once in awhile is a good lesson. It makes you appreciate what you’ve already got at home: temperate weather, friendly people, and clothes that don’t make you look like the Easter Bunny. As much as I enjoyed loafing about and being waited on, it’ll be good to return to Dover Street, where everyone misses me, or at least says that they do, and no one calls me madam.