First of all, this is different than asking if you’d pose for Beaver Hunt or Swingin’ Shlongs XXX and then give your dad a copy of the issue — in which you’ve written ”Happy Yom Kippur!” or “A Festive D-Day to You, Great Aunt Birdie!!!” in all the margins. No one’s even asking you to put a bullwhip up your ass, Mapplethorpe style, and then have the picture painted into the icing of your grandparent’s anniversary cake. I’m thinking this is more like, would you give a family member a photo of yourself done as, say, Renoir might’ve painted you? Believe it or not, Ripley (you don’t mind if I call you Ripley, do you?), I’m saying yes to this. Know why? For starters, some years back, a photographer friend of mine took a series of very pleasant nudes of me that my parents eventually ended up seeing. (Through frozen smiles, they were all, “Um (ahem) these…are (cough, cough)…quite…really…so…I…and…hmmm.” And then, pleadingly, ”Please don’t let your gramma find these. This is why we can’t have nice things.”) Plus, in college, I modeled nude for art classes on and off campus, because 1) that shit is easier than the bullshit they make you do when you work in the dining hall (although it’s harder than it looks) and 2) it paid five times more than any other campus job. Nude, shmude, dude. My family has seen art, for goodness sake. As long as none of the pictures of me resembled porn (and as long as Jeff Koons isn’t deciding which photos qualify as which), I would totally give them a lovely, poetic, nude picture of me. Especially for a million dollars. And for the record, before you get any ideas, my family is NOT cool. Very not! At all!