Dear DOMAI

After reading a letter in your newsletter, I found myself having to comment, twice. You are rightly praised for bringing us photographic subjects with a definite inner beauty, and indeed, that inner-beauty is definitely perceivable with just the photograph. In contrast, Hugh Hefner had to inform us of the inner beauty of his monthly "playmates" with an 8 1/2 by 11 inch bio sheet and several paragraphs of commentary by a professional writer. Perhaps the difference is the focus of the photographs.

And "focus" is the point of my second comment.

Back when I was still in high school, I read a story in Reader's Digest which has stuck with me all these years. I'm 56 now. It was about a widow in a small southern town back during the depression. She owned the town due to her former husbands business. She also lived in a grand estate just beyond the town limits on property which bordered the river, on the opposite side of the river as the town. The bridge crossing the river ran in front of her property.

One day she was sitting at her dining room table and looked out the window to see several grade-school boys diving off the rails of the bridge. This being the depression, the boys were wearing the best swimming attire they owned, their "birthday suits". She was so enraged at this public display of nudity that she immediately called the sheriff and demanded he come out and send the boys home, clothed! So...the sheriff came out and told the boys to move down the stream, where the woman wouldn't see them.

The sheriff got back to his office, returned to his chair behind his desk, pulled out the board for a typewriter, propped his feet up, leaned back in his chair for some more serious contemplation, when the phone rang again. It was the same woman. Seems the boys did move down the stream, to a place that made them perfectly visible when she went into her kitchen to replenish her tea cup. The sheriff returned to the scene of the "crime" and told the boys to move further down the stream.

This time, when the sheriff returned to his office the phone was already ringing. "Sheriff," the town matriarch complained, "when I go up into my attic and look between the slats of the heat vent, I can still see those little boys...neck-id! Now, you get back here and this time you do your job right!"

At the time I first read it, and up until I read today's letter, I thought the moral of the story was, if you look for evil, you're bound to find it, no matter how you define it. However, after reading today's letter I realize that it goes far beyond the pursuit of evil. You will find what you're looking for, no matter what it is. I think that was the essence of the letter as well.

Thank you for, as the writer of the letter put it, looking for inner beauty and then presenting it to us in such a grand manner.

And yes, when I want them to be sexual images, no matter how much you might try to do just the opposite, they do become very sexual...for me.

-- Art S. from Spokane WA, USA

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