Al Martinez: Christina Aguilera goes nude on album cover

Good news. Christina Aguilera is appearing nude on the cover of her latest album, "Lotus."

I don't know why she is nude except that it might create an additional air flow to enhance her vocal range.

I also haven't actually seen her in the altogether, only a scant view offered by the online Huffington Post, America's, sigh, newspaper of the future.

In it, Aguilera's long blond hair flows like a river of promise over what one supposes to be her breasts, which she will no doubt reveal at some future date in a wild ripping open of her blouse accompanied by a raucous "Take a look, boys, take a good look!" in a saloon somewhere in the Yukon.

I have never been able to understand the consuming desire of women in show biz to undress in public. A friend once explained it was all a semantic misunderstanding. They thought show biz meant showing it all, and they were honor bound in a spirit of cooperation to do so.

My first nude was when I was about 11. I was supposed to take my little sister Dolores to see a Mickey Mouse movie and instead snuck her in to a bootlegged showing of actress Hedy Lamarr skinny dipping in a forest pond, in which she shows it all. I had already discovered women's breasts in the National Geographic and with Hedy in her glorious altogether I figured my life was complete.

It wasn't until 1963 when sex was discovered in a lab on the campus of UC Berkeley that our perceptions of male/female eroticism were forever

altered, later to be enhanced by male/male, female/female, male/female/male and so on. The mixtures are endless.

The story that accompanies the somewhat, well, spiritual, arms-spread photograph of Aguilera explains that her album contains the new hit single "Your body," which possibly explains the nudity. It could be no more than a stylized version of the full body charts often seen in a doctor's office that locate the precise position of the liver, the gallbladder and the pancreas.

Ed Lange, who owned Topanga's Elysium Fields, a nu! dist, I mean clothing optional, camp knew all about naked people. They fluttered about him like hummingbirds. I met with Ed occasionally not to ogle the birds, which I had already seen in excess, but to talk to him about county Supervisor Mike Antonovich's efforts to shut the place down. Moral Mike was God's best friend in L.A. and believed that people should only be naked while showering or being born.

Ed died and Elysium Fields did close, but I still have memories of nudes swimming, playing volleyball and generally lounging around like figures in the structured landscape of a Rubens painting.

So even if she does eventually show it all, Aguilera will not be revealing anything we haven't seen before, unless she comes up with a third breast. Even then we have become so accustomed to women in show biz baring their boobs that evidence of her miracle will only be a shrug. Not until she kicks her panties across the stage while rocking "Ave Maria" will anyone notice.

Al Martinez writes a column on Mondays. He can be reached at almtz13@aol.com.