Lehner, Philip N., 1964-1965
Page 178
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Transcription
Lehner, P. 1964 Nov. 19 - continued 2 this was the last island; once again, however, they always pulled something up to cover themselves whenever we approached; Dave spotted one native girl taking a shower in a stall that only came up to her waste and suggested we try that, but I vetoed the idea (why? - I don't know); we finally decided that the only thing we could do was to say yukke, meaning no when they pulled a towel over their breasts and this worked fine - they were delighted to pose in this way and threw the towel away with great pleasure - they apparently felt they were expected to cover themselves in our presence; our great discovery came too late however, and we only managed to photograph two women, one of which was swimming in the lagoon and we called her out of the water to get in a group photo and then had to say yukke when she reached for a towel off the clothesline; we were focusing on this group of women, one of which had on a topless bathing suit, when George spotted us from a distance and raced over to get in the picture; however, he had not seen the one women's nudity and was quite aghast when he crowded in amongst the women and came face to face with semi-nudity; he did turn the tide on Dave, however when he saw that Dave still had his lens cap on - the comments that followed both these incidents were only natural; We had succeeded in photographing the original topless bathing suit and were content to return to the raft with one embarassed photographer and one embarassed subject; George later accepted a grass skirt from a young native girl, a half woven basket and earlier wrung the neck of fowl that was being shown to he and Larry, all of which added up to a good afternoon for George and public relations; we made a radio (over)