NSFW November: Sarah Elizabeth, Miss November 2006

The lovely and talented Sarah Elizabeth, aka Sarah Elizabeth Bowers, was first the Cyber Girl of the Week on Playboy‘s website in December of 2005, then April 2006’s Cyber Girl of the Month, before finally making it to the magazine’s hard copy as Playmate of the Month in November 2006. Most of the playmates from the last ten years or so are kind of ho-hum for me, but she actually seems like a real person who you can have a beer and a conversation with, so I’m down.

Photographed by Stephen Wayda

After a day in the surf Sarah heads to her favorite beach dive. “I walk in and I don’t have to tell them what I’m ordering,” she says. A cold beer lands in front of her in seconds. “There’s never more than 10 people in there. I walk in wearing jeans and flip-flops, with my hair in a ponytail, and put $5 in the jukebox. Then I’m good to go.”

And when she’s not working or lovingly releasing Moby Dick from a lure? Sarah would like to go to a game. “It’s a five-hour drive to Atlanta,” she says. “Maybe when the Braves play the Diamondbacks, my team from Arizona, I’ll drive up there in my Diamondbacks attire and get booed.” (“Southern Comfort,” Playboy, November 2006.)

This is another one of those situations where the issue was so recent that you could easily find all these pictures with a simple google images search, so I’m not going to break my neck putting up shots from the photoshoot. The whole shoot is kind of mediocre anyway, the only thing that saves it is she has a nice smile and doesn’t make the poses too porny. I don’t know what’s up with Stephen Wayda and his shitty photoshoots, but look at that shot up there. Ridiculous. Totally not up to centerfold pictorial par in my book. Well, maybe I’m being hasty. These two shots down below are somewhat interesting and kind of okay, I guess.

Anyway, that’s Sarah Elizabeth, Miss November 2006. Google her if you wish to know more, she’s all over the place.

Ellen V strikes again

I am beginning to feel like a day without Ellen Von Unwerth’s photography is like a day without sunshine.

And by “sunshine,” I mean, “scantily clad pretty people playing with and possibly hurting each other.”

In this case, you got Rosie Huntington-Whitely and Melissa Rose Haro, photographed by EVU in 2005 for the book “Plumes et Dentelles” by beautiful lingerie designer Chantal Thomass. If you wanted to swing by her completely awesome, sexy, incredibly fun, cramazing official site and get me something from there, that’d be a-okay!

Advice: Rachel Weisz NSFW edition and Batman casting ideas

Photographed for Esquire magazine April 2004 by [searching for credit]

“I think mystery is kind of great. I don’t know anything about Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or Ava Gardner — not really — and I like that. I love watching their movies because they’re my personal movie stars. I don’t know what they eat and who their trainer is.”

No clue where this came from; sometimes I just right-click and save things and make no effort to credit them. Super-sorry!

“Most of the time we do nothing, myself included, … I think the lesson I learned from [playing humanitarian Tessa in The Constant Gardner] is that a lot of drops make up an ocean. If people would stand up and say what they believe in maybe we can make a difference. Helping one person is better than nothing. Just do something.”

Still from The Shape of Things

“There’s not much room for eccentricity in Hollywood, and eccentricity is what’s sexy in people.”

I have heard rumors she is one of the actresses who has been approached to play Catwoman in the next Batman movie, but I’ve also heard Chris Nolan quoted saying that Catwoman isn’t going to be in it. It doesn’t matter, because that would be lame anyways. She should not be Catwoman, regardless of whether Selina Kyle pops up in the next movie (a direction which would actually disappoint me).

What Rachel Weisz should do in the new Batman movies is play Talia, the daughter of Rā’s al Ghūl and love of Bruce Wayne’s life. Helloooo, she would be perfect! Talia seriously needs to once and for all get in the mainstream big screen storylines, especially considering how great the new movies Chris Nolan’s been making are: in the comics she even has Batman’s kid, for god’s sake (Damian Wayne, who is the current Robin). It’s already been set up, when, in the novelized Batman Begins, Rā’s al Ghūl refers to having a wife and daughter while he is talking to Bruce.

So, come on. Let’s finally get her in a movie, and let’s have Rachel Weisz play her. The woman is a stranger to neither action pictures (The Mummy franchise) nor comic book movies (the wildly underrated Constantine). That’s my awesome suggestion: obey!

NSFW November: Kai Brendlinger, Miss November 1964

I’m going to go ahead and let the Playboy interview with Miss November 1964, the lovely and talented Kai Bredlinger, almost totally speak for itself.

Photographed by Pompeo Posar

AMBITIONS:
Modeling.

TURN-ONS:
Men. (data sheet).

Ms. Brendlinger did get slightly more specific about that wacky “men” fetish of hers in the more detailed article that accompanied her pictorial:

She eschews the possibility of ever becoming a career woman and anxiously looks toward the day when she can move to the wide-open spaces with her special brand of male, who will be “tall, fair, and smart enough to know he doesn’t have to prove he’s brighter than I.” (“Hallelujah, the Hills,” Playboy, November 1964)

TURNOFFS:
Dirt — I can’t stand anything dirty.

FAVORITE BOOKS:
Only the Bible and I still don’t understand it.

No kiddin’.

Movie Moment and Music Moment: Du Jour, “Backdoor Lover”

The band Du Jour from the brilliant 2001 satire Josie and the Pussycats (I’m not kidding, see it stat if you haven’t already) likes your back door.

This clip shows the entire opening sequence of the movie, including the scandalously hilarious number “Backdoor Lover,” and the set up for the rising action in the film. A truly great movie and a wickedly funny song, if you like parody and loathe pop cultural brainwshing, you will really enjoy this clip.

Also, as a bonus, this video is full of cute, funny boys being adorable. My favorite is Seth. “Hey, little girl, beauty secrets?” (flashes peace sign and makes kissy face.) Yay, I love this movie!!

Daily Batman: Sort of a Batgirl by Ray Caesar

“Sleeping by Day,” by fricking awesome artist Ray Caesar.

NSFW November: Claudia Jennings, Miss November 1969

The lovely and talented Claudia Jennings was Playboy‘s Miss November 1969, and Playmate of the Year in 1970. Her birth name was Mary Eileen Chesterton. If it was me, I’d’ve changed my name too — but I would have just switched my first name to Chesty. Can you dig it? “Hi, I’m Chesty. Chesty Chesterton.” That is a name you can take straight to the mother effing bank!

Photographed by Pompeo Posar

Her father was a sales manager and her mother was a college professor. She was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and later moved to Evanston, Illinois, where she graduated from high school in 1968. Later that year, she joined the Hull House theater company in Chicago and got a job as a receptionist at the offices of Playboy magazine (the wiki).

Claudia feels it’s necessary for her, at this point in her career, to move to one coast or the other, for the Windy City’s theatrical opportunities are limited. “Every actress has her particular skills and drawbacks,” says Claudia. “It’s a show-business axiom that if you really want to overcome your limitations, you go to New York, but if you’re satisfied with your skills, then you’re ready for Hollywood. The reasoning is that with a stage play, you get to work with the same material over a longer period of time than you do with a film, so you have more of a chance to improve.” (“Acting Playmate,” Playboy, November 1969.)

Five years later she was unemployed, single, and depressed; ten years later, she was dead. If you ask me, she chose the wrong coast. I think her sadly short life took a left turn at Albuquerque when she left Chicago and went to that shithole Los Angeles. In Hollywood, she appeared on an episode of The Brady Bunch in 1973 and lived with songwriter Bobby Hart (actual birth name Robert Luke Harshman; do you suppose they called each other by their real names when they were at home, or went with the show biz handles? oh, I fervently hope he called her Chesty…) from 1970-1975. He was the less handsome half of the almost-kinda-famous songwriting duo Boyce and Hart.

I assume the boyfriend got her the part on The Brady Bunch because the Monkees and the Brady Bunch appeared in each other’s shit a lot and Boyce and Hart wrote (and sometimes performed) most of the tunes for the Monkees — please tell me it is not news to you that the Monkees were a sham act developed to be a sort of made-for-tv-Beatles — including “Last Train to Clarksville” and the show’s theme (“Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees,” etc). They also penned such hits as “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” and “Come a Little Bit Closer.” Hart broke up with her in ’75 and, living alone in much smaller quarters than she had been accustomed to, she got super-depressed, turned to a party crowd, and started regularly doing heroin and coke.

On the career side, throughout the 70’s, Claudia appeared in films, mainly just drive-in horror movie flicks. The wiki claimed they called her Queen of the B’s but I’m a huge B-movie guy and I have never heard this. I mean, I recognized her, but I didn’t think of her particularly as the queen. And the wiki has it somewhat wrong: I wouldn’t really call them B movies, because I associate that with an earlier genre of film, a la Ed Wood.

The types of 1970’s movies that Claudia was in are more like cult classics, thinly veiled excuses for weirdo softcore porn. Think of it as early skinemax, or very lite spatterporn. Personal favorites are Unholy Rollers about the motherfucking all-girl ROLLER DERBY (sorry, I get excited, cause, you know … sk8 or die), Deathsport, which takes place in the year 3000, and Gator Bait, which I believe needs no explanation.

In ’79, she auditioned to replace Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels but good old Aaron Spelling and company were not fans of her Playboy credit and gave the job to Shelley Hack instead. (Hack’s turn as Tiffany Welles almost sank the show and she was fired in 1980 anyways, so whatever.)

On October 3, 1979, almost a decade to the day after her Playboy pictorial hit the newsstands, Claudia was driving to the home of her on-again, off-again boyfriend Stan Herman in Malibu to pick up her shit cause they had broken up again when her Volkswagen Beetle was hit by a van and she was killed. She was thirty years old.