Tall and tan and young and lovely (or, any size or age), the Girls from Ipanema can go topless on the beach again, thanks to Rio's mayor.
State security chief Josias Qunital tells the Associated Press police will not stop women from sunbathing topless any longer. "In my opinion," says Mayor Luiz Paulo Conde in a published interview, "this will be the summer of topless."
You'd think this would be a moot point since the Girl from Ipanema - in reality as well as the legendary jazz-bossa nova hit of the 1960s - never wore all that much to begin with, but when Rio police arrested a woman for public obscenity for going topless on Barra de Tijuca beach last week, it kicked off a furor when the public saw it on television.
Conde says in the interview he favors "intimate contact with nature". But he also says he won't set the example in public, on grounds that it was "aesthetically complicated."
On Ipanema Beach Tuesday, the AP says, men wore bikinis to protest the police crackdown and semi-nude women carried signs covering their chests.
Meanwhile, the charges against the woman - and her husband, who was arrested when he intervened to protect his wife - have been dropped.
