Nakedness, Story 4: Naked Retreat

What would you do for the sake of a story? In this live story, recorded at the 2024 Senior Story Slam, Alina Wilson shares the story that spawned this series on Nakedness for State of the Human.

Transcript for Nakedness, Story 4: Naked Retreat

Show Theme Opening

Destiny: This is State of the Human, the Podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience, like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring you stories that deepen our understanding of that experience. 

My name is Destiny Cunningham, and in this series, we're looking at the theme of nakedness. This series features stories about naked theater, exposure therapy, strip clubs, nudist retreats, and coming out to our parents. 

As we close out our series, we want to leave you with one last story–a live story that gives a behind the scene's look at the experience that brought our show team together and laid the groundwork for this entire series. 

It was recorded at the Stanford Senior Story Jam, a live storytelling event created by Harriett Jernigan as a way for seniors to pass along their experiences before they graduate. Trigger warning, we'll be encouraging you to expose yourself in public . . . consensually and conscientiously. Here's Alina Wilson with that story.

Alina Wilson: What would y'all do for the plot?

No, this is a genuine question. And for those that don't speak Gen Z, that means what would you do for a good story? Okay. So what my coworkers and I did for a good story was go to a nudist retreat. Let me give you some background. So I'm a producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project, which are like the audio podcast girlies at Stanford. Except we make it cool, I promise. 

And so after studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, I come back to Stanford and I become a producer for SSP. And being a producer means that you are hands-on, you're producing stories, you're producing podcasts, like really life-changing work, right? Really life-saving work too.

And I remember walking up the stairs to Sweet Hall. I go to the fourth floor and I enter this SSP meeting and they're like, “Alina, okay, we're so happy you're back from abroad. It's time to choose a show team.” And a show team, they're the folks that you're gonna see for the next however long you work at SSP and make stories with.

And I remember looking around, there's a team called Invisibility over in that corner as I'm walking into the room and there's a team like, I don't even know, playing or something. Most of them I don't remember. But there was one team, and this team was called Nakedness. And at that point I didn't have strong feelings about nakedness. I chose this team just because there were two sisters sitting there. Okay. The two black people in the room were sitting at the nakedness team, and I was like, that's my team. Right? And I knew Destiny from this Buddhist meditation retreat I had been on a year before, so that was the team I was gonna be on.

So. We fast forward to the first meeting of nakedness. We've also had two other wonderful people of color join the team. One non-binary person who's of Asian descent called Leah, and another Latine person called Ana, who would soon become my best friend. That's a whole nother story, and I'm here with Destiny and Smeek, who are the two sisters that I like spotted across the room and knew I had to join the team for. And we're sitting and you know, we're just like chatting. We're yapping. It's supposed to be about storytelling, but we're just like kiking as one does. And we're like, okay, so we have to make a story. What should we do for nakedness? And we're like, guys, we should go on a nudist retreat. Like that was the whole progression. It happened that quick. 

So after we come up with this crazy idea, we do some Googling and we find this place called Lupin Lodge, right? It's a woman-founded nudist retreat in Los Gatos, California. And we look it up and we're like, this is like within an hour and a half. Like it's probably closer than that, but I'm directionally challenged.

So we're like, we can get here and do it in a day, which means somehow it works with the quarter system schedule. So we're in this, right? And because we're all students at Stanford, right, we live in California, we had a consent conversation first. 

So imagine like us sitting in the room like recording because we're audio girlies and we're like, “how are you feeling about getting naked?” We're looking around and we're like, “I don't know,” and then we talk about our trauma, right? We talk about our trauma. So. We decided we're getting naked. And honestly, I don't remember that much of the conversation, but I do remember how I felt, and I make jokes about it, but I felt so cared for in that space. Like here were these people who were having this consent conversation because they knew that we had faced harm, we had faced trauma, we had struggled in our naked bodies and our naked selves, and they wanted us to feel okay and to feel safe. And one thing I do remember is that Smeek, one of the sisters, she said to me, “and if anyone looks at y'all funny,” and she's looking at all of us, she's like, “if anyone looks at y'all funny, we're gonna pull up. Like we'll fight someone for you in this retreat.” And that's how I knew I was gonna be taken care of. 

So fast forward to the day we go to Los Gatos, California Loop and Launch. I get in this white car and Ana's driving and we're going down the road. And I don't know about y'all, but I'm a no thoughts head empty person. Like when they came up with the phrase “no thought, head empty,” like they were thinking about me in particular. So I hadn't had a single thought about getting naked until I was in this car on the way to get naked, like we had planned this weeks ago. I had joined the team like a month ago, and I just now thought about getting naked and, you know, we're Stanford students. That means like 80% of us are anxious. 

So we're like all shaking in the car and there's so much pent up energy 'cause we're gonna be naked and we're coworkers and we've known each other for a month now. And then Ana said, she's like, “guys, what if we just screamed? Like, what if we just let out a primal scream, like the way you do, like the night before final start?” That's what we did. We rolled down the windows and we shouted and we just let it out and we still have the tape of it. And I just felt like I was like releasing. 

But we get to the retreat and it was this brick cottage and they're like, okay, so the rules are you don't make anyone else uncomfortable. You don't take photos. And have a good time. Right? 

So we get to the parking lot and we're wondering, okay, like when do we get naked? Like do we get naked in the lobby? Like do we get naked on the grass over there? And we're just kind of like looking around still in the car recording because we already really, and then I see something outta my corner of my eye, just like a little bit, and I just turn around a little bit and I'm like, “naked man! Naked man! Naked man!” And everyone else is like, “oh my god, naked man!” Um, yeah. But we were at a nudist retreat, so I don't know why we're freaking out. Like that's what we signed up for.

So we walk out and we walk up to the showers 'cause we decide the first thing we're gonna do is go swimming together as a show team. And. I looked around and that's when it really hit me–like no thoughts had empty, but this really hit me. I was like, this isn't a locker room where you can kind of like hide your body and like get as small as you can basically get in your locker to take your clothes off.

No, you're like right out in the middle of this beautifully wooded, nudist retreat. But the thing is it wasn't that big of a deal. Someone just like took their shirt off and then we're taking our pants off and it was kind of just like when you're undressing in your dorm room, except you're with your coworkers and our clothes were off and we showered.

We got into the pool, we swam. It was kind of airier without the swimsuit on. It was nice. We saw a couple men and like tried to avoid them mostly, and yeah, it was fine. We got outta the pool, we decided to. Hang out in this grassy area and have a picnic. And y'all talk about main character energy. 'cause here we were like blasting sza singing about being in our twenties and we were all in our twenties and we were naked and we were with our coworkers and we're eating char coochie.

Like there was a Charco board right there, charcuterie. And yeah, it was amazing. It was surprisingly amazing to just be there with those, those queer people of color that I've, I've literally never talked with outside of work and just to be naked. It felt, it felt fear than I've ever felt. It felt, it felt natural.

I. And, you know, after we had our, our picnic moment and we journaled a little bit, and of course we recorded some audio. We, we did a little naked hike and I like put on my pants because, you know, we don't wanna chave while we're hiking. But yeah, my, my top was still off and we were just, we were just chatting and I remember Destiny said to me, she was like, “Alina, this could never happened on campus. Like the tech bros would look at us funny. We couldn't be naked like this.”And we were probably at the retreat for five hours, and as we were putting our clothes back on, we had finished the hike and we were, we were back near the car As we were putting our clothes back on, Ana said to me, “I wish I didn't have to put my clothes back on.” Which, who would've thought about this like five hours before? We thought this was gonna be the craziest shit we'd ever done. Like, but no one wanted to put their clothes back on because it felt right to be naked together, and it felt, it felt like anti-capitalist. It felt like anti-white supremacy. I don't know, like we're all CSRE in here. It's okay. 

As we were driving back, I just felt like this bond had been created between all of us, you know, over the past years. Those girls are some of my best friends, some of my best friends. And hits June, we're producing our nakedness show. And I didn't know what it meant to be exposed, to be vulnerable in that way, but I do know that we had this joyful experience. We had this experience of community and of care and of wonder.

And that's why you guys should get naked with your coworkers.

{Applause and cheering from audience}

Closing Credits

Destiny Cunningham: That was “Naked Retreat” by Alina Wilson. Her live story was recorded in May of 2024 at the Stanford Senior Story Slam, hosted by Harriett Jernigan.

We wanted to end this series on Nakedness with this episode because it exemplifies what we, as a team, have learned about getting naked: it can be scary, uncomfortable, and overwhelming–but it's also freeing. That kind of vulnerability can open us up to deep friendships and personal transformation. 

You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Alina Wilson and me, Destiny Cunningham, with support from Laura Joyce Davis, Dawn J. Frazer, Megan Calfas, Melissa Dyrdahl, and Jonah Willihngands.

For their generous financial support, we’d like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, The Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden.

You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcasts, workshops, live events, and courses at storytelling.stanford.edu. You can find this and every episode of State of the Human on our website or anywhere you listen to podcasts. 

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Destiny Cunningham. Thanks for listening.