Thank goodness we’ve been receiving plenty of rain. With drier conditions, it would have been only a matter of time before someone would bring up the idea of having naked rain dancers. In March, Reuters news services reported, "Hundreds of Australian women danced naked at a secluded location amid drought-ravaged farmland in a ritual intended to bring rain." The dancers weren’t actually identified. We can only presume they were wives and daughters of farmers, and possibly sympathetic women from the community, willing to boogie for a good cause. "The dance was held alongside regional family day activities," continued the article, "with the women taken by buses to a secret location to complete the dance either naked or partially clothed, in sarongs." One organizer for the dance, who expected rain to fall within a week, noted, "It has been a great day for community connectedness and positive mental health for people in drought-affected areas." A great day, of course, if you’re not an easily embarrassed teenager who is reluctant to even accompany a mother to the grocery store out of fear she might sing along with the store’s Muzak system. It might be difficult to accept the mental picture of a mother baring it all in broad daylight. Community connectedness involving nudity might not be a top priority in other parts of the world where law enforcement officers are trained to recognize indecent exposure for what it really is. The ritual might have been a good idea for some dress store owner who, instead of receiving one case of non-returnable sarongs in a spring shipment, had to sign for one shipload of the garments. That’s a bad situation when few women can remember or care to resemble movie actress Dorothy Lamour, who often wore sarongs. Naked rain dancing might not be well-received in many of our own communities, where community connectedness is normally associated with church and school activities — bazaars, bingo games, fund-raising bake sales and potluck suppers. The rain dances might have been good news for bus drivers with wide-angle and close-up camera lenses and a market for grainy photos of dancing nymphs with stretch marks and other imperfections. After all, regular women were dancing, not Las Vegas showgirls. In our country, we have historically battled droughts with no-nonsense praying, salting clouds and hiring rainmakers. On extreme occasions, when we really can use some rain, we hang out laundry to dry, wash our cars, reserve tee times at a golf course, plan an outdoor wedding or clean every window in sight. All of those activities are guaranteed to produce torrential downpours. The Australian rain dances might have brightened the lives of the farmers worried about their crops. Perhaps the idea of their wives dancing around in their birthday suits and howling at the hot noonday sun was enough to make them temporarily forget their troubles and anxieties. In addition, there was always the possibility it might rain.
