All over, charity calendars have a nude attitude

When the ladies of Rylstone, England, decided to take it off -- well, take it almost all off -- for a fundraising calendar, they couldn’t have foreseen the worldwide fallout.

The Rylstone Women’s Institute 2000 calendar, which showcased not nubile young women but nearly nude middle-aged ladies discreetly posed behind gardening or homemaking equipment, sparked international interest and the movie “Calendar Girls.”

The calendar honored one of the institute’s members, whose husband had died of cancer. The participants could not have known that the project, begun as a lark, would raise more than $750,000 for leukemia and lymphoma research.

Nor could they have known that gardeners in Texas (Dirty!), firefighters in Rhode Island (Hot!), accordion players in Newfoundland (Squeeze it!), wool spinners in Maine (Scratchy!) and the full-Vermont-y “Men of Maple Corners” soon would follow suit -- make that birthday suit.

And in Massachusetts, former Clinton Cabinet member Robert Reich posed for a 2004 calendar supporting Cambridge Community TV -- in the buff behind a shopping basket filled with greens from which pokes an impressively large baguette.

Men and women around the world eagerly have popped their tops and dropped their drawers to raise thousands of dollars for school projects, community centers, medical research and local charities. The nude calendars -- more nice than naughty -- caught on big-time in the United States and Canada, and while the concept is now in danger of becoming a cliche, the clothing is still coming off and the money is still rolling in.

Just ask Paula Colburn, of Clippers Hair Salon in Putnam, Conn. With the help of male patrons of the neighboring Midtown Fitness facility and photographer Lori Edwards, she produced 200 calendars for 2004 that raised about $1,000 for Wigs for Kids, which helps children suffering the effects of chemotherapy.

“We had to twist some arms [to get the amateur models],” Colburn says, “but it was fun. They all had their tops off to show their muscles. Once people saw it was for a good cause, there were no objections.” For next year, Colburn is envisioning a calendar with more active settings and possibly some female models.

In Junction City, Ore., the 2004 “Men of the Long Tom Grange” calendar is a runaway success, having raised nearly $200,000 to date, well beyond the hoped-for $25,000.

“We needed more than hot cinnamon rolls at the annual Daffodil Festival [to help support local schools],” says the woman behind the project, Danuta Pfeiffer. Her vineyard-owner husband, Robin, is Mr. March, who appears with a strategically held bunch of daffodils. Mr. August is on the local school board, and Mr. May is Marty Manning, 63, an electrician.

Manning’s daughter, Catherine, says her parents had joined the Grange, but it was through the making of the calendar and the subsequent publicity and events that her father really got to know people. “The men of the calendar found that they had bonded together more than expected; it was as if they were in a club all their own,” she says.

Pfeiffer says the wives of Grange members had to volunteer their husbands for the project.

“We can’t sell the calendars fast enough, but it took two years to talk the guys into it. None of the men wanted to go first.”

Pfeiffer used skills she acquired in a long career in TV and radio, including a stint as co-host of Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” to produce and market the calendar. She says that after the “Long Tom” project was featured on television and in a newspaper, orders came rolling in, some from as far away as McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, the Arctic and Poland.

She says that when a local priest wrote a letter saying the calendar was corrupting children, and several women asked the school board not to accept the money, the protests caused sales to triple. “A little controversy goes a long way,” Pfeiffer says.

Jamie Hooper, a professional photographer in Junction City, says he did boudoir photography in the 1980s, but that shooting the calendar and getting natural, relaxed smiles from his male models, who range in age from 40 to 70, was a challenge.

“These were guys I had not met before. It was shake hands and take off your clothes.”

What helped was being creative with the placement of props, such as cowboy hats, coils of electrical cord and a tool belt, Hooper says. “They were dressed in objects, not clothing.”

He says the secret of success for such calendars is the free word-of-mouth advertising generated by curious neighbors. “If the art is barns or babies, no one talks about it,” he says.

Some projects, such as the “Vail Undressed Legends and Celebrities” calendar in Colorado, and the artistic “Breast of Canada” calendar, which raises funds for breast-health research and includes women who have had mastectomies, are still flourishing.

Others had a shorter shelf life. The “Men of Maple Corner” calendar, based in Calais, Vt., raised more than $500,000 for a community center and local charities but called it quits after two years. Similarly, Maine’s wearingwool.com calendar -- “celebrating the ancient art of spinning and the ageless beauty of women” -- isn’t back for 2004. Despite its success, its creators say on its website, “We decided we liked spinning better than the business of calendar making. So we have gone back to spinning.”

In the United Kingdom, where it all began, some commentators are growing bored with the phenomenon. Annie Gunner, who writes an online column for Third Force News, a project of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organizations, laments that the world is “now awash, alas, with nude calendars. Anyone, anywhere, trying to raise funds has hit on the idea of getting their kit off and becoming Mr. January.”

She goes on to quote 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who once said, “I have seen three emperors in their nakedness and the sight was not inspiring.”

“Go, Otto,” writes Gunner. “And for gawd’s sake, the rest of you, get bloody dressed.”