Strib: Park Police Clamp Down On Skinny Dipping
Nick Coleman: Skinny-dipping? Don't go there Star Tribune, August 25, 2004
Sleep well, Minneapolis. Your police are on duty, busting naked people.
It happens every summer.
Last month, four women from Macalester College in St. Paul wandered over to Sin City to try skinny-dipping at Cedar Lake, engaging in an innocent rite of passage on an 80-something-degree night by swimming at Hidden Beach -- a well-known den of nudity.
Innocence is always risky.
Most hard-core nudists -- who have given the neighbors fits for years -- know better than to skinny-dip on the hottest nights of summer, because they know the cops will be on the lookout for bare bums. So it's the neophyte nudes who get busted. You pretty much have to be 19 to think you can get away with cheeky fun in this country.
The four Mac women learned a lesson in Minneapolis they will never forget.
It began when the astonished women watched from the water as a half-dozen police cars swooped down on the beach as if Saddam Hussein himself were taking a dip.
The boys in blue were shocked -- shocked! -- to find skinny-dipping going on.
I am not in favor of nudists running loose on the street. But let him or her who has not skinny-dipped cast the first sandal. When you think about what goes on around this place on a summer night -- with 10,000 lakes beckoning -- it's amazing we are not a famous fleshpot.
We'll never be, at this rate.
Luce Guillen-Givins, a 19-year-old from lakeless Arizona, had never skinny-dipped before. But on July 19, she was one of the four women charged with being in a city park after the 10 p.m. closing time and with being improperly attired. That last charge was a no-brainer, since the women's clothes were piled on the beach when the Minneapolis Bod Squad roared up.
The Park Board clothing ordinance contains steamy language you may not wish to share with the kids: "No person 10 years of age or older shall intentionally expose his or her genitals, pubic area, buttocks or female breast below the areola ... in or upon any park or parkway."
Obviously, Guillen-Givins and friends -- Layne Mullett, Sarah Small and Colleen Stockman -- were in the buff. But it was dark and they were in the water, things that make skinny-dipping good clean fun. It wasn't until the cops ordered the women out of the water and put them under the glare of lights that they felt naked and ashamed.