Amy Gunderson and her breasts made a brief appearance at Coney Island's
 Mermaid Parade last month. Only the police were aroused.

Within seconds of Gunderson and her breasts' foray into the public in the
 parking lot of the new KeySpan Park, an ironically surnamed police
 sergeant  Matthew Venus slapped the threesome with a summons. If found
 guilty, Amy Gunderson and her breasts might be forced to spend 50 days
 in jail.

If you've guessed that there is more to this story than Puritanical
 policing, you have guessed correctly.

For 18 years, the Mermaid Parade has been one of the city's few great
 public events -- and in true Coney Island fashion, parade participants
 are encouraged to dress up (or NOT dress up) as their favorite sea
 creature and let it all hang out for a day.

In all those years, ACRES of breasts have been exposed. And in all those
 years, no one has gotten a summons. So what happened? In short, it's all
 my fault.

This year, parade organizer Dick Zigun decided to hold part of the parade
 within KeySpan Park, the Brooklyn Cyclones' publicly financed pleasure
 palace by the sea. When some people complained about Zigun's plan to
 rent the new stadium and sell tickets to what had always been a free
 event, I wrote a column about the alleged "sell out" (see, "Will $$ Rain
 on Coney Parade?" 6/18/01).

In the end, I sided with Zigun's effort to bridge the cultural gulf
 between fans of the Cyclones, in their baseball caps and t-shirts, and
 fans of Coney Island's gritty freak show, with their tattoos and their
 pierced nipples.

But I also joked about having to pay to watch the part of the parade when
 women typically remove their tops to get the full attention of the
 costume judges. If I wanted to pay $10 to see a topless woman, I
 reasoned, I'd go to some club that Mayor Giuliani hasn't already zoned
 out of existence.

Well, the Cyclones front office wasn't laughing. The day after my story
 ran, the team told Zigun that it would halt the parade if there was any
 nudity.

"Everything was fine until your stupid story," Zigun's lawyer Ron Kuby
 told me (I trust he meant "stupid" figuratively, not literally). "It was
 only then that the Cyclones went crazy."

Kuby -- whom I have actually seen naked, and if anything is an argument
 against public nudity, it is his torso -- informed Cyclones vice
 president R.C. Reuteman that a woman's right to go topless is enshrined
 in the Court of Appeals' 1992 ruling in People v. Santorelli, which
 mocked the "assumption that a female's uncovered breast in a public
 place is offensive to the average person in a way that a male's
 uncovered breast is not."

Kuby told me that his conversation with Reuteman "ended abruptly" at that
 point. But fearing that his parade would be ruined, Zigun signed a
 last-minute agreement that there would be no nudity.

Of course, no one told that to Amy Gunderson and her breasts.

"When I walked into the parking lot, a police officer said, `Ma'am,
 that's not appropriate,'" Gunderson said. "I told him the law, but he
 said he had to write me a ticket because the Cyclones and the city had a
 deal that there would be no nudity."

Reuteman defended his efforts to cover up Amy Gunderson's breasts.
 "KeySpan Park is private property," he said. "We operate a clean and
 wholesome facility and nudity is not part of what we do. We won't
 tolerate it."

But Kuby's suggested that Reuteman might have to. "KeySpan Park is a
 public accommodation, not a private social club," he said. "The Cyclones
 can't, for example, forbid blacks from going to games because that would
 be discrimination. Well, according to the Court of Appeals, it's
 discrimination to forbid a woman from exercising her right to go
 topless." (The city Law Department did not return my call.)

The good news is that Gunderson and her breasts ended up marching in the
 parade anyway, thanks to a couple of strategically placed Band-Aids. 

Funny thing, though: When she entered the stadium for a second time, a
 cop actually said to her, "Hey, what's with the Band-Aids?"

Now here was a cop who knew the law. Or maybe he just likes mermaids.

--30--

email: gershny@yahoo.com