The Temptation to Streak In NYC, and Why the NY Post Editor Should Try it

To the Editor of the New York Post:

Last Friday, your cover page ran what I consider to be the most important news of the week. I’m talking, of course, about the naked saga of Josh Drimmer.

Now, I know your paper writes quite a lot about tales of the naked, so allow me to jog your memory. Drimmer is a slightly overweight, pasty Brooklynite. He has curly red hair, a scraggly beard and, in spite of being in his late 20s, a MySpace profile. Last week, he seemingly decided he wasn’t taking it anymore and, in a throwback to the era where live nudes were the reason people went to Times Square, ran buck naked around Seventh Avenue. Besides undoubtedly attaining immortality in the vacation albums of several hundred Japanese tourists, Drimmer made it into your paper’s front-page article.

According to your exclusive story, our hero’s naked run started somewhere around 47th Street. There, he brazenly stripped down, eventually moving to the place every naked, seemingly deranged person in Midtown ends up: the Olive Garden.

As your article made clear, however, Lady Fortune was not on his pale, hairless backside. At the Olive Garden, as he pressed the family jewels against the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, store employees locked him out.

He stayed just long enough for every patron in the restaurant to rethink whether the $7.95 penne with meatballs was such a good deal after all, then crossed the street to Tad’s Steakhouse, reportedly giving those patrons a sausage sampler they’re not likely to forget soon.

Chased out, he waddled around 48th Street, where a police officer stopped him, and, following Department protocol, asked the unclothed suspect, “Got any ID on you?”
Now, let’s get something straight, Mr. Editor. Normally, I buy your paper to do the Sudoku, go over the cartoons, and glance at the hot girl on page three. When I actually read the thing, I expect to laugh along with your witty, mischievous tone. Your article Friday, however, in trying to paint Drimmer as a naked wacko, completely missed that note.

For one, Drimmer is not the garden-variety crazy portrayed in the story. As an aspiring writer, he cut his teeth in college writing music reviews for the Yale Herald, penned articles for the Daily News, and even wrote a handful of off-Broadway plays.

In one of those plays, about a high-flying pop band and their strained relationship with their robot drummer, Drimmer set out to ask the hard questions. “Can the band survive the drug-induced depressive funk their robot has slipped into?” he queried, before really nailing it by asking, “Is society even ready to accept a robot rock band?”

Now I ask you, Mr. Editor, how could your paper really lead itself to brand a man whose writing addresses the slippery discourse of human-robot relations as a naked wacko?

Perhaps most revealing, and a fact your paper didn’t print until Saturday, is the reason Drimmer gives for his romp. Namely, Drimmer explained that he was very, very, tired and not thinking straight after not sleeping for several days.

As a newspaper editor, I know you must have pulled several consecutive all-nighters covering the endless antics of Paris, Britney, and their frenemy La Lohan. Now I ask you, Mr. Editor, haven’t you ever gone a little crazy during those late nights? And when you’ve gone a little crazy, haven’t you ever wanted to run naked around Midtown? And when you’ve gone a little crazy and wanted to run naked around Midtown, haven’t you been tempted to stick your crotch in the glass pane at the Olive Garden, simultaneously grossing out the bridge-and-tunnel crowd while tea-bagging a symbol of soul-less strip mall capitalism?

You don’t have to answer, Mr. Editor, but I know the answer is yes.

Your paper has painted Josh Drimmer as an eccentric, a weird guy, someone worthy of showing up on the Jerry Springer Show during a not-particularly-scandalous episode. And there, Mr. Editor, lies the fault of your article. From posh Riverdale condos to Harlem projects, from Upper East Side townhouses to Lower East Side tenements, from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Queens to the Bronx (okay, maybe not Staten Island), this entire city IS like a not-particularly-scandalous episode of Springer. Except for the southern accents.

In conclusion, I urge you to print a retraction. Until next time, remember to take care of yourself, and each other.

Eleazar David Melendez can be reached at eleazar.david.melendez@columbiaspectator.com.