how far Bermuda will allow stage nudity to go. If one topless girl dances this year, next year there will be a greater number as Greg Thompson's performers continue their Las Vegas type shows.

There are a large number of people who have difficulty with topless anything, even men topless on the streets. It is hard to believe that those people who want men to be told to put their shirts on on the street and who do not want women on the street wearing hair curlers, want topless girls on stage, no matter how many veils they drape. Bermudians do not seem to want casino gambling and it may follow that they do not want the type of show associated with casinos.

However, the Follies could have been encouraged to go topless because of the enthusiasm of Bermudians for the forbidden fruit of the Luscious Lollipops, which turned the prison service into such a joke, and for the male oriented events at Scandal nightclub on Front Street and the female oriented events at Le Club on Bermudiana Road. Maybe the Greg Thompson show producers felt that by being covered their show was lagging behind the public demand. In fact, the shows for which people were convicted in Magistrates' Court were doubtless a good deal more raunchy than the Follies. There are many Bermudians who see Bermuda as a resort which is and should be very different from those places with topless bars and bottomless beaches even though they might think topless is fine in Las Vegas or Paris. There are those who feel, for all sorts of reasons, many of them religious, that topless is lewd and should not be allowed. There are many, men and women, because we should not forget that the prison officers also presented male performers at the Mothers' Day show as well as the Luscious Lollipops for fathers, who want to attend at the Prison Officers' Club and at Scandal and who are quite happy with what they see.

Standards for what is and is not acceptable are a constantly changing thing in any country and are tested and relaxed according to what the public will and will not accept. The public today accepts standards it would never have agreed to even ten years ago. Prime time TV talk shows broadcast personal details which would have been unthinkable in the days TV would not show Elvis Presley wiggling his hips. Fundamentally pornographic movies like Basic Instinct are held over in the cinemas. Sex, lies and videotape is on prime time cable.

Drugs, sex, violence and Satanism blare from radios. Topless and bottomless abound in magazines.

We do not know where Bermuda's standard is, having been roundly criticised for reporting recent court actions in some detail, even by the Commissioner of Prisons whose men sold tickets to the Luscious Lollipops. But we do know that once topless is accepted at the Southampton Princess, then it become the acceptable standard because the public generally will ignore double standards.

Topless beaches will be next but Bermuda will have to face that anyway if it ever manages to attract those European visitors it constantly says it wants.

Before people get too carried away by the Follies, we should remember that the local stage went nude about 25 years ago at City Hall when the old Bermuda Festival presented the Negro Ensemble Company in Moon Over Monkey Mountain and the star actor, Ron O'Neil, stripped full frontal bare. No one complained.