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You can only prolong actually getting naked at a public shower for so long.
On my first visit to The Ritz, I noticed myself lingering on the steps leading up to getting into my birthday suit: taking an extra second or two taking off my shoes, buying shampoo and conditioner at the concession stand, and adjusting my bag in my chosen cubby just-so.
When I was on-site at the Country Fair last year, my first time attending, I was too nervous to try out The Ritz. But this year, I wanted to see it all to mark the 50 year milestone.
This year marks a half-century since The Ritz Sauna and Showers, the outdoor open air communal shower space at the far end of the Oregon Country Fair, opened in 1976. For the last five decades, the outdoor shower, sauna and music space has persisted amid a decline in communal nudity worldwide. In two separate articles, The Atlantic pointed to a downward trend in younger bathers’ comfort with nude beaches — even in Europe — as well as casual locker room nudity.
But the 50th year comes at a difficult time for The Ritz.
It’s the first Country Fair since the death of George Braddock, one of the co-founders and a driving force behind its creation, maintenance and artwork, in January.
The Ritz has also faced some modern scrutiny in recent parts of its half-century history: critiques of cultural appropriation and the danger of smartphone usage, particularly after a man was arrested for recording people at The Ritz last year, allegedly using a cellphone placed in a toiletries caddy.
But neither grief nor concern stopped people from coming to The Ritz this year, where a bright pink flamingo parade (a nod to the shower’s original logos featuring the bird in a top hat) celebrated the anniversary, the line for Women’s Hour stretched into the distance, and, as usual, a lot of naked people showering together.
“We’re all naked under our clothes,” said The Ritz booth representative Alice Wheeler. “To come in, take your stuff off, take a shower in community… although it’s so uncommon, it’s so natural, and it really empowers people. They come out and it’s like, ‘I can’t believe I just did this, and it was this beautiful experience.’”
“People always think…” she continued, before restarting: “There’s not anything going on in there but bathing and showing up in community with your family.”
I wanted to try it out for the anniversary. Though reporters are denied access to The Ritz on the media tours, they are free to participate as a member of the public.
But the public can only get half of the experience. Volunteers and workers with access to The Ritz at night are treated to full concert sets where both the talent and audience are naked. (The public also pays $20 to access The Ritz, while “Fair Family” get in for $15.)
I shelled out $40 across my two pop-ins over the weekend, to see the naked truth for myself.
Putting on The Ritz, without its driving force
The Ritz has its origins in Braddock’s backyard, where he built a sauna and outdoor shower that friends suggested could be useful at the Country Fair.
“That whole idea of creating an opportunity for people to bathe together was really a wonderful experience and was a surprise to me,” Braddock said in a 2011 video interview for historian Bob Nisbet’s YouTube channel. “It continues to be a surprise to me to this day that strangers from all walks of life come here and take off their clothes and take a bath together and enjoy it.”
Fair leaders told the group of five — Braddock, John Hardenbrook, Craig Geary, Rich Wilkinson and Darrell Justus — to set up on a part of the land at the far end of the grounds, not intended as an attraction for the public but as a word-of-mouth respite for people working in the dust.
It continues to be a surprise to me to this day that strangers from all walks of life come here and take off their clothes and take a bath together and enjoy it.
george braddock, a co-founder of the ritz, in a 2011 interview
Ken Hardenbrook, Wheeler’s husband and the nephew of John Hardenbrook, said Braddock had been looking forward to the anniversary milestone, and had been spry even in his final weeks. “He stayed at our house just before he passed, and after he left, I went to work and he weeded the flower beds while he was there,” Hardenbrook said.
Though Braddock is gone, Hardenbrook said the crew at The Ritz has the muscle memory to get the actual work of organizing, cleaning, and maintaining the showers and saunas done. The loss is not having him there for input, and not having what Wheeler called his “creative genius” that sparked the best in others.
“I don’t think of myself as in charge here,” Braddock said. “I really feel that I’m more like the director of an orchestra, and I create palettes, an opportunity for people to be creative, to express their best work.”
The ask for someone’s “best work” sounds simple, Wheeler said, until someone realizes just how big an ask it is to really put in their best work. But people did it for Braddock, she said.
“Missing George is built into everything we do,” Wheeler said.
Modern times come for The Ritz
The Ritz has faced some modern scrutiny in recent parts of its half-century history: critiques of cultural appropriation and the proliferation of smart phone usage.
Critics have pointed to the artwork throughout The Ritz as guilty of cultural appropriation, an aesthetic lifting of Indigenous culture in the artwork throughout the shower and sauna space. A controversial wood carved “story pole” was supposed to go up in 2017 until members of Native American tribes spoke out; Siletz tribe members Autumn DePoe-Hughes told the Willamette Week that the pole was an “abomination.” It was ultimately kept in storage, per a KLCC report.
Though the “story pole” was nixed, the artwork throughout The Ritz is clearly inspired by Pacific Northwest Native American aesthetics (with a flamingo lilt), with Braddock in the Nisbet interview pointing to both Pacific Northwest and Alaskan aesthetic traditions.
Eugene Weekly spoke with Native American artists at the Country Fair last year, with some pointing to signs of progress since the 2024 creation of the Native Arts and Crafts Market section of the event. The Ritz has also commissioned a Eugene-based Tlingit artist, Pattrick Price, for more artwork inside the shower and sauna space.
The 2025 EW piece raised a point on trying to confirm if the Native-style artwork inside The Ritz is attributed to Native artists; but on my visits, the pieces didn’t carry specific artist information at all, instead being integrated into the general environment of the showers and sauna.
Smartphones have also added a new layer of concern, both at The Ritz and at nudist spaces in general.
Last year, Elmira man Elijah Russo was arrested for recording people at The Ritz without consent during the fair’s set-up weekend, with reports that he used a cellphone placed in a toiletries caddy. (Russo later pleaded guilty to first-degree invasion of personal privacy, a felony, as well as recording people without their knowledge or consent; he was sentenced to three years probation.)
In line at The Ritz this year, volunteers asked attendees to turn off their phones and place them at the bottom of their bags as a precautionary measure, with a crew member saying it was “new this year.”
When Russo was arrested, I was the reporter on duty to write up the news. Konnie May, a vendor for three decades, told me The Ritz stoked confidence in her as a younger woman able to see other women, comfortable in their own skin. The recording was a violation of the mutual trust that’s expected throughout the Country Fair, she said, but wouldn’t stop her.
“I’ll still go to the Ritz and take a shower,” she told me last year. “If somebody wants to see my fat butt, good luck.”
I was inspired.
Trying out The Ritz
Where some spent childhoods running carefree and soaking in hot springs, my middle school outfits included shame and Spanx. I am a chubby woman raised in the American South, leagues away from the flower child body freedom energy many Oregonians are socialized with.
So, for advice on tackling The Ritz, I turned to our media tour guide, a longtime Country Fair volunteer named Becca Perry. Perry, also a therapist, has been showering at The Ritz since the 1990s. She told me the most important thing was to take it slow, and make sure I had consent from myself.
“Just being around other people where bodies are just bodies, there’s all sorts of shapes, sizes, everything, it removes social class barriers to some extent,” she said. “We’re all just kind of the same under our clothes.”
But she was also concerned about younger generations being less comfortable with being naked around others, where Gen X, older millennials and younger Baby Boomers, she said, had a “sweet spot” of radical body acceptance.
On the path, I ran into Eugene ballerina Sara Stockwell; when I told her I was going to go to The Ritz for the first time, she hugged me. She said that The Ritz, like a lot of the Country Fair, would not exist if people were ruled by logic.
“It defies realistic expectations,” she said. “It’s a sauna in the middle of the forest. Everybody’s naked and free, everybody’s just in their body and loving their body, and all the kinds of bodies that exist in the world. Everybody is in their flesh.”
But there’s no need to worry about a generational die-off in attendance at The Ritz, either; in my two visits, both during general hours and Women’s Hour, the crowd had people of every age. The line in particular for Women’s Hour stretched far out of sight.
It defies realistic expectations. It’s a sauna in the middle of the forest. sara stockwell, a eugene-based dancer
Okay, to be objective: showering at The Ritz is not all roses, womyn and kumbaya. Once I had stored my belongings in a cubby and claimed a shower spot, I was blasted with cold water. The water temperature in the actual showers themselves jumps frenetically, so this all came at the cost of an icy shower that all of a sudden turned into a very, very hot one in a half-second. (My shower at home also does not cost $20 to use.)
I walked into the one of the saunas and was faced with walls of women, sitting on terraced planks of wood on either side and singing. Hot-stepping it in the buff to find a seat to “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes mid-verse, I was tickled to jump in.
Later, I swung back to sing some more — a group sauna set list that included Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” which I wish every woman the privilege of singing in a group with others of every age; Florence + the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over” (I was particularly pleased with my participation in this one, as no one knew all of the lyrics but I had enough to keep us on track); and Ke$ha’s “TiKToK” at first but, after no one knew enough lyrics to keep it going, a pivot to the same album’s “We R Who We R.”
There’s a mutual, unspoken agreement to not stare at anyone, but I’ll remember the hands.
When someone needed assistance stepping down from a higher perch, waves of them reached out to her to help. I jumped a little when an older woman wordlessly put her hand on my shoulder as someone needed help getting into the sauna, but settled in.
After the sauna, I found a spot in front of a drying fire. We sat and listened as a musician played a mandolin, wearing only a draping skirt. I watched the white ash float through the air, and land on my skin.
I left buzzing, having seen some women comfortable in bodies that, I think, mine could like in my later years. They were beautiful.
The next morning, I got ready as usual in my apartment, no cash needed.
After three go-rounds at The Ritz under the sun, surrounded by people, art and music in the open air, my everyday bathroom and its apartment-standard ceiling felt mournfully muted. It was just a shower.
