rat is too lazy to post his own stuff...

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While I don't plan to attend this event, I applaud this woman's efforts. It would be great if this March 7th parade got coverage on national network news... but I doubt it will.
regards,
rat

Orlando Sentinel
COLUMNIST Mike Lafferty
Published December 5, 2003

Cleaning up special events in Daytona Beach was a top priority for Yvonne Scarlett-Golden in her campaign for mayor.

Mayor Scarlett-Golden, I would like you to meet Elizabeth Book. There is a chance the two of you will become better acquainted during the next few months.

Here is why: Book has plans for the next Bike Week that will test your pledge to strictly enforce Daytona Beach's codes of conduct.

Specifically, Book wants to recruit 1,000 women to join her near the city pier on March 7, shed their shirts and march in top-free glory down Main Street to protest an ordinance that criminalizes breast exposure.

Is she serious? Book already has talked to the police about logistics and has been distributing fliers around town.

She plans to launch an all-out campaign early next year.

This act of civil disobedience no doubt will come as welcome news to the multitude of bikers who line Main Street and usually must ask women to expose their breasts.

Book, who works in sales and marketing for Florida Bikers Digest, has some history with the city's anti-nudity laws. She was fined $120 in 1998 after walking into the Full Moon Saloon in Daytona Beach and, at the request of patrons, pulling up her tube top. (A fine under the city's new ordinance is $253.)

Somehow, Book said, school administrators found out and banned her from chaperoning field trips and other events involving her daughter's class.

Book, known around town as the "Wild Rose," was inspired to become an activist by the "Topfree 10," a group of women challenging Brevard County and state nudity ordinances on the grounds they treat men's and women's breasts differently.

"Why should the very breasts that nurtured kids throughout the millennium be something criminal?" asks Book, 41.

At Biketoberfest earlier this year, Book said she spotted a shirtless guy with a massive belly and breasts "five times bigger than mine." She found a cop and asked, "Why aren't you going to arrest him?"

Why not, indeed?

Book has been in touch with Mark Tietig, who is representing the Topfree 10 and said he is standing by to help her with legal advice and other assistance, should she proceed with her protest.

She also has put in a call to Morley Schloss, whose former wife was among the women arrested in Rochester, N.Y., in the 1980s.

The arrests set off a legal chain of events, ending with the state's high court ruling that women could legally go topless.

Schloss, who now lives at a nudist resort in Loxahatchee, likes Book's motives but worries about the spectacle of bikers hooting and leering at hundreds of topless women on Main Street.

Rather, Schloss suggests a low-key, topless picnic at a public park, where arrests would set the stage for a legal challenge based on equal protection, that is, the unfairness of treating men's breasts differently from women's.

But we might be getting ahead of ourselves. Book first must find another 999 women willing to walk the Main Street gantlet.

Let's face it, she may not be able to recruit nine women.

If Book does pull this off, won't it be fun to see how Daytona Beach's mayor responds?

Mike Lafferty can be reached at mlafferty@orlandosentinel.com or 386-851-7921.


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