In the fall of 2004, I literally dropped my threads.

On a chilly October morning, at sixty-seven years of age, I sat waiting, semi-nude, for my first formal photo shoot. In the flood-damaged studio of photographer Michael Cullen, we “calendar girls” were taking our turns posing, bare from the waist up, in aid of our community’s flood relief fundraising drive.

Behind me in the wan winter light, another model, Gwen Brown, a venerated local amateur actor, looking much younger than her eighty-three years, laughed girlishlyas she positioned tragedy and comedy masks over her breasts.

My teeth were chattering from cold and apprehension, but I felt strangely exhilarated. Six months after my last chemotherapy treatment, I was back in the loop of active Peterborough women. An award-winning photographer, a close friend of my son, was now zooming in for a close-up of my alarmingly revealed body. And for public purposes!

The project: to create a glossy calendar for the year 2005, featuring “provocative but tasteful” pictures of some of Peterborough’s well-known older women, ages fifty-five to eighty-six. This project was the brainchild of our feisty long-time mayor, Sylvia Sutherland, who took her inspiration from the Rylstone Women’s Institute in Yorkshire. In 2000, those women “took it off” in aid of cancer research. Their calendar has raised over $2 million since then and has also inspired the popular movie Calendar Girls.

Christine Clancy, Miss September in that original calendar, emailed us her best wishes: “Your project has a special interest for me,” she said. “My brother David lives in Peterborough and was badly affected by your flood.”

On July 14, 2004, during the night, the city was inundated by 220 millimetres of rain in four hours. It was the worst storm in Peterborough’s history, causing $80 million in damage. While there was no loss of life, there was human misery, especially for small business owners and for students and poor families in basement apartments. As well, the public library was so water-damaged it didn’t reopen for four months.

Our flood made the national news for a week. One memorable photo caught a wet, brown beaver waddling across the main street. Debris from affected households — mattresses, rugs, drywall and appliances ruined by sewer overflow — made many streets impassable. Help in pumping out basements came from twenty-eight fire departments across Ontario. Hydro was disconnected in five hundred homes and gas in one thousand others. The average amount of water flowing into our water treatment plant is ten million gallons a day; on July 14, it was fifty-four million gallons. One thousand people needed emergency food.

We older women, for the most part unaffected by the flood, were happy to pitch in. The project became a series of surprises, almost all of them pleasant. As news leaked out about what we were doing and the local press gave it front page coverage, the people of our tattered town chuckled. And, as we learned, they also took up positions.

For me, participation was almost instinctive. It had a component of altruism, some measure of rebellion against what is taken for granted about older women, some glee in feeling better after a serious illness and an inchoate politico-feminist intention.

We models began to meet at businesswoman Erica Cherney’s house. Time was short. We drank red wine and all talked at once. We gazed at each woman with both admiration and frankness, and offered ideas about how she was perceived in the community and with what artifacts she might pose to best convey those perceptions. We composed captions for each photo.

June Whiteman is eighty-six, somewhat deaf and certainly reticent about modern ways such as email. Nonetheless the photo featuring her singing “Stormy Weather” and showing her great gams, was chosen to grace the cover of our calendar, which we titled “The Age of Beauty.”

“Rosemary,” June told me, “the legs are the last to go.”

Ada Lee, by far the most accomplished showgirl among us, a jazz singer who has had a professional career in two countries, confessed she really found it hard to drop her blouse. “I was born a Baptist,” she explained. Goodith Heeney, the town’s leading volunteer, reported that she had given a passing teenage boy a fright that morning as she posed in the garden of the hospice centre. I decided to put on my African cap and my Jamaican necklace and to find a globe big enough for frontal modesty, in order to express the global theme of the caption on my page: “It Takes a World of Women.”

The photographer, Mike Cullen, was an added bonus. He reassured us, “Don’t worry about which month you’ll represent. I am hoping to show something of who you are, what you have experienced and what qualities you give this city.” When, at the end of my shoot, I gaily asked him, “Would your mother do this, Mike?” he paused before he replied with obvious emotion, “My mother died in June of a brain tumour.” I put my arms around him. When he regained his composure, he went on, “And no, she would not have done this!” His artistry and good humour with eighteen women became, I’m sure, a tribute to his mother.

Support came from many quarters. My spouse was wholeheartedly delighted. He mailed off calendars to his five sisters. His California sister asked for three more because her art instructor wanted them for class. My oldest son, Jim, wrote teasingly from BC: “Mother, I will buy one, but I want all the others destroyed!” Our son Paul put a notice on the bulletin board in his school staff room in Toronto and got twelve orders. My four-year-old grandson, Tommy, in Halifax gazed at my picture, mused a while and then said “Hmmm, Grandma, bare bum.”

The reaction beyond the families wasn’t so even. Peterborough has been historically conservative, a kind of middle-Canada, mostly Anglo-Saxon. It wouldn’t be the Canadian city that leapt to mind as the place of origin for a publication of pictures of laughing, semi-nude women of a certain age and prominence. Our set of “girls,” after all, included the mayor, a playwright who almost single-handedly built the local concert hall, a peace activist and family physician and me, a feminist Catholic teacher.

So controversy raged in Peterborough. All through October letters to the editor filled the pages of the papers. One man criticized “the government representatives who jump on the bandwagon of prostitution and pornography to support their own cause.” Another writer suggested acidly that calendar girl Mary Smith, who is a Lakefield councillor, would be “appearing in every machine shop in the county” and should “pay more attention to the village septic problems.” A deacon I have known for years stopped me on the street to shake his head in sorrow and give me a holy card with a picture of the Virgin Mary’s sad gaze. Try as I might, I could not see my participation in the calendar girl project as a matter for confession.

There was other expressed resistance, and questions too. Our small Muslim community privately voiced its disapproval of this project. My friend Linda Slavin, a committed and self-critical feminist, wondered if we were playing into the hands of exploiters of the female body. I had no ready answer, except that we were turning that image of women on its head and trying to challenge such exploitation by a tongue-in-cheek mocking of it.

Actually, clergy response varied. Josephine Mewett, Miss January 2006, is a United Church minister who posed gracefully in clerical collar and stole. When she took some flack, she simply went off to Milwaukee to look after her grandchildren for a week. The Anglican dean boasted he had two parishioners in the calendar. I had to note ruefully that no Catholic priest or bishop was there to support me — although I was ready with a solid theological argument that what the calendar girls had done was to give flesh to generosity, a Christian virtue.

It seemed that people either “got it” or didn’t. And those who did were from a wider spectrum of the population than we expected. We had thought that sales would be mostly to older women, but many young men bought the calendars happily for their wives. At a location such as the mall, we would take turns autographing the calendars. “Do you want me to put ‘To Wendy’?” we’d ask, just assuming they hadn’t bought the calendars as pin-ups for themselves!

Our calendar had been financed by a real estate manager who also runs homes for seniors. He asked that the launch take place at one of the senior residences, where he would supply wine and cheese. The idea was that each of us, wearing black and pearls, would be escorted on stage by two men in tuxedos, while the host of a local radio show announced our presence. The fun mounted. We were to stop and unveil a blown-up photo of ourselves and remain in pose until all flashbulbs stopped popping.

What was it Andy Warhol said about fifteen minutes of fame? Ours was about to happen.

A cheering crowd of three hundred awaited us; mostly family members, but also lots of other citizens from all walks of life. We sold three hundred calendars in forty-five minutes. Three weeks later, the total count on sales was 4,500.

I think what people were cheering for was our lives and the lives of others like us: our losses and suffering, our renewal, our guts and lack of self-consciousness, our acceptance of aging and our zest for life. Most people have important older women in their lives. This project offered a chance to show gratitude for them in an unsentimental way.

A major highlight for me was the late-January sell-off. By then we were into our third printing and had raised $80,000 for flood relief. All future sales were to benefit Southeast Asian tsunami victims. At Lansdowne Place one Saturday, I stood at our booth and heard people say over and over “I think this is great.” Perhaps what they were really saying was hurray for older women. Hurray for the human body in its older female form, in all its grand diversity, including drooping eyelids, salt and pepper hair, brown spots, bifocals and thickened waists.

Then when we heard that the breast screening clinic nurses at the hospital were hanging a calendar right where women could see it and smile as they are pinched, we felt particularly proud. When social workers dealing with anorexic teens asked us to talk with some of their young clients about body image, we felt equally satisfied. When Orillia asked us to send a few calendar girls to speak at a women’s conference there, we were again happy. And when the Raging Grannies immortalized us in a new song, we knew we had arrived!

The calendar girls project of 2004 in Peterborough was, ultimately, about women’s freedom and self-acceptance held up to a collective public witness — with a big dose of laughter.

Rosemary Ganley was born and raised in Kirkland Lake and later went on to teach English in Canada, Jamaica and Tanzania.

She was a co-founder of the international development agency, Jamaican Self Help, in Peterbrough in 1980 and has worked in feminist circles for many years, attending the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Recently she has been co-editor of Catholic New Times, the independent social justice newspaper published in Toronto.

She lives in Peterbrough, Ontario.