These are a few of the main characters of the old story which is now my newest novel.
Superchicken is Edward-Andrew Campbell. He is basically a me-character. His embarrassing nickname, from a Jay Ward cartoon that used to be on TV Saturday mornings, was actually my nickname in junior high and high school. Many of the emotional changes he goes through and the embarrassments he endures to be a super hero were based on my own experiences. But he definitely embraces the nickname as his superhero name in a way I can only wish that I did.
Brent Clarke is the outgoing athlete sort of kid who was definitely not me. He becomes leader of the Norwall Pirates because he pitched for the softball team, and because anyone who met him naturally assumed he was the most important kid in the group. Others look to him for leadership even when they don’t need it. Making friends with Brent is one of the most difficult and important tasks the Superchicken must undertake.
Milt Morgan is the wizard of the group. He is obsessed with magic and imagination. And though Brent is nominally the leader of the group, all their evil plans and hair-brained schemes come from Milt’s imagination. The picture of Milt is drawn from me as a boy, but in reality he is the other Mike from my childhood, the one with a rather tough life and a heart of… well… maybe not gold, but at least silver. He is also the one who insists on making Edward-Andrew part of the gang.
The Cobble Sisters, Sherry and Shelly, are a pair of identical twin girls. They are both nudists at home on the farm place and at the nudist club in Clear Lake. They are problematic for a shy boy just discovering girls, but Sherry definitely pursues a crush on the Superchicken and tricks him into a family camping trip at the nudist camp.
Sherry at the Sunshine Club
Anita Jones is the shy girl who has a crush on the Superchicken. And he secretly has a crush on her. But she is also the girl who becomes, completely by accident, the first girl that Edward-Andrew sees naked. Love and hate, embarrassment and attraction, she is the one girl whose opinion seems to matter most. I, of course, will never reveal the real life girl she is based on. I could never live that down, even though we are both now more than sixty years old.
So those are a few of the main characters that make this novel work for me. They are real people to me now that the novel is written, just as they were once real people when I was a boy and living the nightmare of being a mere boy in a world that needs heroes.
Body Image Advice for Truly Ugly People
Yes, I, of all people, should probably not be trying to give advice to ugly people. I have some wisdom about ugliness to share, but only by participation in the world as a member of that class of people that ordinary folk would really, really, extremely importantly not want to see naked. I am not Boris Karloff’s Mummy unwrapped, but I am in no way pretty under my clothes.
So why would anybody with six incurable diseases, one of which is a skin disease that involves reddish pink bleedy spots, ever contemplate becoming a nudist?
Well, horrible as I am, I have had a lifelong yearning for a life lived naked. I recently found an online quiz thing that asked the question, “Should you become a nudist?” Here is the result it gave me;
So, apparently, I have nudist tendencies. I have been concealing a long-standing desire to throw off all my clothes and walk around naked all the time. And I have been doing it all my life. But I am not some mentally ill pervert, or even an exhibitionist. I just have an innate feeling, as I suspect most people do, that I was meant to live a more natural life wearing only the things that God clothed me with. When I think of myself naked, I try to think of myself more like the boy I have drawn here to picture the feelings I have about nudity;
There is a certain innocence and rightness involved in being nude. I don’t generally push it in people’s faces. I don’t plaster a bunch of naked pictures of myself on the internet. Some nudists do. I see a lot of naked people on Twitter now that I have written articles for nudist blogs and joined a couple of nudist websites. But they are not Playboy magazine nudes. They are more often than not the slightly overweight, blobby sort of people that look like oddly bulbous stacks of uncooked pancake dough. They are the kind of unfettered and unashamed personal body images that go a long way toward making me feel better about my fat old blobby-spotty self. If people like that can be proud of their naked form, then my bugged-out eyes help convince my stupid head that I could do it too.
I have been to a nudist park precisely one time. As chronicled in this blog last July, I visited the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. I have been naked in the presence of other naked people. And it really is a liberating experience. Being seen naked by naked girls is not nearly as soul-crushingly embarrassing as I once believed. Especially since being a nudist is in no way about sex. In fact, lewd behavior of any kind gets you kicked out of a nudist park faster than if you were doing the same thing at the Ballpark at Arlington for a Texas Rangers baseball game. (Most of those lewd dudes, admittedly, were fueled more by alcohol than hormones.) Those people at the nudist park did not look at me, scream in horror, and run away. They looked me in the eye, smiled, and talked to me as if I were the same as they are.
So my advice to sincerely ugly people, based on my own experiences as a bug-ugly human being is… become a nudist. Learn to accept your whole ugly, horrible self as an ordinary human being with no artificial veneer. Do not cover up who you actually are. Then, you may begin to see that what you always thought of as ugliness and horribleness is really beauty and grace and healthy human-ness.
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Tagged as Bluebonnet nudist park, body image, humor, nudists