WINDHAM, MA — Mini skirts, low slung jeans, and crop tops on the street are one thing – but an adult video store sign with the silhouette of a woman in a snug dress is simply too much for some Windham, MA citizens to endure. After all, what will the children think?Most importantly, what will the children ask — and how can answering those questions be dodged?
Although neighbors who worry about the effect of the sign on children wish it could be removed entirely, along with the business it promotes, the best that they’ll get is a relocation – something XXXPosed’s co-owner, Maurice Brancato, has already contracted to have done.
In spite of Brancato’s willingness to accommodate the seven or either sensitive individuals who have formally complained, city planners insist that the sign’s contents meet local regulations — and some locals have observed that it’s no saucier than the familiar mud flap girls seen on 18-wheelers and everyday trucks.
What it is, however, is seven feet too close to the street right-of-way, which is why Brancato has no real choice but to move it.
According to the Eagle Tribune, Planning Board member Ruth-Ellen Post, who thinks the sign is inappropriate for the eyes of young children, although thinks that it’s not the same sign the board approved on February 20th.
Brancato, on the other hand, insists that it is.
“What they approved, I put up,” he assured the Eagle Tribune.
Some board members wish that they had taken more time to discuss design alternatives with Brancato; something that might have avoided at least some of the complaints and saved the board from its current rock-and-a-hard-place location on the issue.
“We get criticized if we follow our regulations and we run a serious risk of the town being sued if we do not,” as Post explains.
While city planners contemplate revisiting the sign ordinance and fretting about whether the silhouetted woman is actually naked, 25-year-old XXXPosed clerk, Meagan Faria, wonders what all of the fuss is about. The working mother of a two-year-old observes that “A lot of moms come into the store, a lot of dads, too.”
They just leave their children at home.
Besides, Faria points out, the woman on the sign isn’t even nude; she’s wearing a snug fitting dress.
Perhaps it’s not so much what the silhouette is or is not wearing, as what it inspires its viewers to think she is or is not wearing.
