Shoreham bares all for library benefit calendar

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

The United States has no federal laws against public nudity, but Vermont is one of the only states in the Union without laws requiring clothing in public. The townspeople of Shoreham, however, are not trying to play into the naked Vermonter stereotype: they took off their clothes for community, not celebrity.

Eight years ago, in the tiny meeting room of the Platt Memorial Library, the townspeople of Shoreham decided that their library, while historic and charming, was too small. Three years later, after halting advances in fundraising, Leslie Goodrich proposed a naked calendar, inspired by the 2003 film "Calendar Girls." In early 2007, the staging began for Shoreham's own naked calendar.

"There's certainly nothing raunchy or lewd about it," Goodrich said. "Edgy, funny, unusual - yeah, but we did something a little different from what we've seen done in other places. Other calendars have been all men or all women and they haven't been of mixed age, but our calendar is really a community venture and it ranges in ages from seven months to 70 years old, and there are men and women in all walks of life."

The calendar features 12 color photos of seemingly nude members of businesses from the Shoreham Inn to the Fort Ticonderoga Ferry. The library itself is also featured in February. Jim Ortuno, owner of Shoreham Upholstery, represented most community members when he said the idea was alarming at first, but posing nude was a very simple thing to do to support the library.

"It was about doing for the community, and I was goaded into it more than anything else by the members of the library board," Ortuno said. "You don't necessarily have to be an exhibitionist to do this. I'm not an exhibitionist - it was just something that needed to be done. Getting past that and making this fun was what it was all about."

The cost of renovations to double the space in the 800-square-foot building is over $500,000. When the Friends of the Platt Memorial Library, a non-profit organization formed to oversee the building project, began with bake sales, plant sales and wine and cheese parties, they were met with limited success in a town of less than 1,300 people.

"We wanted to try and reach out to a larger group of people than just folks in Shoreham," Goodrich said.

Goodrich's plan worked. Calendar sales have netted over $20,000 on top of the $180,000 raised through smaller fundraisers. Shannon Bohler-Small, president of the Friends and events and administrative coordinator at the Center for the Arts, said the calendar has been "far and away [their] best fundraiser," but the Friends are only halfway there. They are considering grants to push their funds over the top.

The construction costs of expansion will support additional programming. The library will become handicap-accessible, and the extra space will be used to expand the collections. Additionally, the renovated library will have a new computer room and serve as a community meeting space.

"Meeting space is at a premium in Shoreham," Bohler-Small said. "The people of Shoreham want to maintain their own town personality and not get drawn into being sort of like a bedroom community for Middlebury."

Community has been a recurring theme throughout the calendar production. The calendar came together because of the townspeoples' willingness to disrobe, and it was produced professionally for free by Tom and Lisa Balfour. The Balfours' creative Photoshopping allowed Shoreham's residents to bare only what they were comfortable with.

"A lot of people have different views about the purpose and place of the public library and what a community means, but if you think about getting almost naked with everybody, you're taking down those barriers," Goodrich said. "You're opening up and being together with nothing to hide."

The openness of Shoreham's community members has sold calendars because of the humor in seeing regular folks in the buff, but also because of what it means; a year's worth of people so dedicated to their community they are willing to take their clothes off has appeal that is apparently worldwide.

"There are a few repercussions of things that happened afterwards because of notoriety," Ortuno said. "I have people come into the shop that I've never met before and they'll look around and say, 'This is where you guys shot the calendar!' or they'll call and say, 'Are you guys wearing clothes today while you're working?' All of this from perfect strangers."

Those perfect strangers might feel comfortable sharing that joke with Ortuno because he and his fellow business owners felt comfortable sharing their community (and their privates) with the world.