Showing a lotta leg

Johnny Cash spent a career brandishing his toughness by dressing in black. Big whup. Snooty scholars with hands as soft as day-old croissants have been wearing black forever.

You want to really be tough? Wear shorts.

Wear them for 2,135 days straight (as of yesterday). Shovel snow in shorts. Whistle past a glacially cold graveyard in shorts.

You want to know tough? Go into The Snap Shop in Great Barrington. There you’ll find Steve Carlotta and his bare knees. He’s been wearing shorts everyday since Feb. 26, 2000.

The year 2000? Yup, President Clinton was still making paper airplanes with the White House stationary. Boy bands were still testing America’s patience. And Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay were still exchanging playful noogies on the sun-kissed banks of the Euphrates River.

Through rain, snow and a gauntlet of aghast looks as he struts the wintry crosswalks of Great Barrington, Steve, 58, has done what so many only dream about: live so consistently with his legs unencumbered by cloth.

When I say “so many,” I’m not exaggerating. The Berkshires are home to a veritable Free Knees Society. People who, as our earth turns into an ice cube, still dress for July.

The Free Kneers’ most prominent members include Tony Carlotto of Sheffield (Steve’s nephew and camera shop compatriot). There’s also the celebrated author Simon Winchester of Sandisfield who, by the way, has bony knees.

But if there’s one man to whom the Free Kneers look to as an icon, one man whose hairy legs symbolically serve as twin Che Gueverras fighting the tyranny of trousers, that would be the venerable Berkshire Eagle reporter Derek Gentile.

“He’s the one who really inspired me,” admits Steve.

As luck would have it, Derek was available for an interview.

“I’ve been wearing shorts year round since I was in college,” says Derek. That was 25 years ago. “I used to come to class in shorts because my last class was only 15 minutes before basketball practice started,” he explains.

He eventually discovered that, except on really, REALLY cold days, his legs didn’t get too chilled. “And shorts were more comfortable, and they were cheaper to buy.” He’s been wearing shorts to selectmen meetings and ribbon-cutting ceremonies ever since.

As for Steve’s shorts-wearing record, Derek can only gaze in amazement at what he calls Steve’s “Cal Ripkin-like devotion.”  

Simon, a British native, is also amazed. He and Steve once had what can only be described as a mythic-like encounter among shorts-wearing giants. It was a couple years ago, after a snowstorm. Simon had embedded his car in a snow bank near Steve’s Sandisfield home.

“I got this boom, boom, boom, 9 o’clock one night at the door,” recalls Steve. “I walk out in my shorts, and there’s another guy in shorts: Simon Winchester. We kind of look at each other. He tells me he’s stuck. So I help him shovel out his car. Two guys in shorts.”

As for Simon, he wears shorts “because I’m British.” (As everyone knows, the road to happiness for the British is often paved with eccentricities — the sort that guarantee them a two-barstool-wide berth in most American watering holes).

Still, when the snow drifts were rising last week, Simon turned to jeans. Even a Brit has his limits. Tony and Derek, too, say the deep, DEEP freeze makes them reach for pants. Steve doesn’t appear to have such limits. He says he owns one pair of pants, and he has no idea where they are.

“Hey, I wear a hat,” he says, defensively.

Actually, he did dig up his pants a couple years ago for jury duty.

“He didn’t want to get a contempt of court,” Tony explains.

But by 9 a.m. he was excused. And by 9:03 a.m. he was in his car changing back into shorts.

He started wearing shorts in the fall of 1998 after an operation. At the time, it hurt him to wear pants.  “I kind got used to it and really enjoyed it,” says Steve, whose shorts collection has grown to more than 20 pairs.

Most customers at The Snap Shop have come to rely on Steve and Tony for separate, yet equally impractical reasons. They see Steve as proof there’s consistency in this mad world. As for Tony, they view his bare legs as a barometer for weather wickedness.

Tony, 52, has worn pants once already this winter, but his toughness is not to be questioned (even though Steve calls him a wimp).

Unlike Steve, last winter Tony skied down Butternut dressed only in a leopard-skin thong and vest. Just one run, though.

“The problem,” Tony says, “is your legs start to stick to the chairlift.”