Indecent Exposure

With the exception of an incident at one New Year’s Eve party, none of my friends in high school had ever been the victim of someone’s indecent exposure. Instead, we were actually the exposers. We could argue about whether or not our exposures were indecent. We thought they were hilarious.

Most weekend nights, cruising around the streets of northwest Columbus, we crammed ourselves into the front and back seats of Sparky’s Vista Cruiser. The way back was used for those of us who had the urge to moon the car or cars behind us. The back seat was used for those who wanted to moon the people in the car or cars beside us. I was not an exhibitionist like most of my pals. I never mooned. I was very particular about dropping my drawers. Plus, I was so tall, climbing into the way back or just situating my long body properly in the back seat, was too much of a hassle. That’s my story, anyway, and as the song goes, I’m sticking to it. At any rate, I was guilty by association. If we had ever been arrested, and thank God we never were, I would have gone down with my girls, never identifying which rears had been revealed.

I don’t know who thought up the activity of mooning – exposing one’s bare buttocks to the world – or how it became a favorite pastime of ours. It just did. Most of our moms at that time, hadn’t even seen our bare butts in over a decade and yet a multitude of strangers had!

My friends derived such joy out of exposing their derrieres but I was intoxicated by the danger their mooning put us in. Poor Spark, who loved exposing her own bottom, rarely had an opportunity to do so unless she let someone else drive the Vista Cruiser. Which was more often than you’d think.

Mooning, mooning, mooning. The act of mooning seemed so scandalous at the time. Looking back now, it seems like an innocent act of rebellion – no drugs, no violence, no tattoos.  Just us, in a station wagon, baring our butts. I imagine though, if caught mooning today, the consequences would be much more severe than they would have been back then.

To be clear, we were always very responsible mooners. We didn’t moon kids, for instance. Our only mooning was at night and we rarely saw any little kids out and about then. We tried our best not to moon law enforcement vehicles. In fact, most of our mooning was directed to a carload of our friends traveling right behind us. Otherwise, we chose our victims (audiences?) carefully – but quickly. It had to be quick because in just a few seconds, the audience car would either pass by us or one of us would make a turn. And man, when Sparky made a turn, did some bare butts fly!

You never see mooners anymore, do you? What happened to them? Did our cars get too small for a while? Now that SUVs monopolize our highways, why hasn’t mooning started back up? Is it because we’re all much more insistent on wearing seatbelts? I don’t think they were required back when I was in high school. Maybe today’s high schoolers are just more mature than my friends and I were. No. That couldn’t be it. More likely, their pants are too tight to pull down quickly.

Or maybe we’re just more sensitive to the folks who share our roads who, like us, really don’t want or need to see another ass before the end of their day.