Early bird refuses to dress for others

Dear Miss Manners: I have a family member who absolutely needs his morning cup of coffee the first thing after getting up. So he crawls out of bed and heads straight to the kitchen in his “tighty whities” and undershirt.

Then he holds conversation in a kitchen with a lot of windows, which other family members are embarrassed by, and concerned that fellow neighbors can see in or passers-by on the street when they are walking through our neighborhood. How can we solve this issue?

Gentle Reader: A coffee maker in the bedroom? Window shades? Everyone else in the family leading him out of the kitchen to converse?

Miss Manners suspects that what you really want from her is a way to teach your relative modesty. But she gathers from his coffee habit that he is a grown-up, and she supposes that the family has had no success arguing its own embarrassment.

For him to be embarrassed enough to go put on a robe, for goodness’ sake, there has to be someone whose disapproval would embarrass him. The neighbors? The police? It might be easier to find a nice, gauzy material that will let in the light but blur the view and nail it over the windows.