Photo via Splash

Eight years ago this month, the two of us got up at an obscene hour on a Sunday morning to take part in one of Spencer Tunick's mass nude shoots. We were editors at a sex magazine at the time and felt some professional obligation to push our personal boundaries. (These days we've grown more comfortable with the fact that you can't always practice what you preach.)

Happily, neither police nor paparazzi showed up--it was during that period after Tunick and Rudy Guiliani had started to make nice but before Tunick was truly world-famous--and even more happily, we never managed to locate ourselves in the final print...it was just a sea of pale, fleshy bodies in the Williamsburg dawn and we could have been any one of them. In fact, Em had such a good time that, a few years later, she got up in the middle of the night for Tunick's first women-only shoot, this time at Grand Central Station (the sound that 400 women make when their naked bodies hit a cold marble floor simultaneously is quite something).

She even let Tunick do a scaled-down shoot in the back room at her 30th birthday party: because what better way to embrace turning 30 in the city of youth than to get naked with 30 of your closest friends?! But there's no freakin' way either one of us would have joined in Tunick's recent shoot at South Beach. We get that it was a "comment on excess" (Tunick has always insisted on being referred to as an artist rather than a photographer and takes himself quite seriously). But still, when the entire thing is filmed by TV news crews from around the world and participants say things like, "They say that I'm thin enough to go to the pool shot now and I'm so happy about that!" well, it's hard to tell where the excess ends and the comment begins. But hey, at least he's still yelling at guys to keep their legs together.