I realized that I have more Miss Novembers than days in November. So we’re going to have to start doubling up. Oh, no.
Photographed by Arny Freytag
The only good preppy is a naked preppy. Here to prove it is Playboy’s Miss November 1994, the lovely and talented Donna Perry.
Ms. Perry is kind of an Amazon, dudes. 5’11”, 34-25-35, 135 lbs at the time of her centerfold appearance. I said goddamn, that’s a whole lot of toned lady. Haters to the left!
A Glendale, California native, Donna Perry’s initial ambition was modeling, but she found more jobs as an extra and in walk-on parts in Baywatch, 90210, and the film Wayne’s World (yay, something I’ve actually seen!). In her Playmate interview in 1994, she said, “People say I got married too young, but I want to have kids before I’m 26. You get along better with your kids if you’re younger when you have them” (“Driving Miss Perry,” D.B. Atcheson. Playboy, November 1994).
Today, at 38, Donna is still married to rocker husband Mike and has a son. She is a nurse on the island of Oahu. She has a profile on the imdb but the majority of her credits are for Playboy stuff. Her most recently recorded non-Playboy project is a cameo in 2002’s intellectual tour de force Blue Crush.
Between her centerfold spread and the cover, I bet this issue pulled down some pretty good numbers. Plus, check it out — interview with Joseph Heller (Catch-22). I’m sure that is what tipped the scale and hence it sold like hotcakes! Aw. I’m sorry. Totally unfair strike at readers. Honest, super-sorry. The articles really are good.
Later this month, we will come back to Ms. Perry and her connection to another Miss November. Ooooh, anticipation!
The lovely and talented Lisa Baker, Playboy’s Miss November 1966 enjoys jazz, cheese-tasting, and a refreshingly open-minded take on afternoon snacking attire.
Photographed by either Bill Figge or Ed DeLong
Cheese looks like simple red-rind edam, alcohol looks like some kind of dessert wine, I am going to say Sauternes because I could drink that by the bottle and think it pairs well with cheese.
I like to order a cheese plate, where they give you the whole range from mild to sharp, with a glass of Sauternes at a fancy place when I feel like being hoity-toity and/or want to die from eating cheese, as I am viciously lactose intolerant and never remember to carry any kind of medicine with me. Read: if in some distant future, I am out with you, and I order a cheese plate, sex is not even remotely on my mind. The spirit may be willing thanks to the wine, but the flesh? Weak doesn’t begin to cover it.
Stomach swelling and projectile vomit notwithstanding, I am not the only girl who gets ga-ga over cute little cheese samples and suchlike. Sauternes and a cheese plate with nuts and triangle slices of that quince stuff have mellowed many a lady’s mind and made her look at her date more charitably. All the elements of a cheese-tasting spread are honestly easy to procure, and look super-posh. Believe me. Take this to the bank. We women go bananas for that kind of shit. Dessert wine, cheese varieties, almonds, and quince: write that down.
Records visible in the centerfold photo are Trini Lopez’s “Trini Lopez at PJ’s,” a live recording from 1963; the 1960 album “Hello Love” by Ella Fitzgerald; and “Playboy Presents: Once In A Blue Moon” by Johnny Janis (nice plug by the magazine).
Get it: the skis make her bunny ears. That’s kind of clever, right?
Anyway, I’ve blathered all this time about cheese and wine and LP’s mainly because I got all these pictures but very little info about Ms. Baker, other than that she was Playmate of the Year in 1967. Outside of that, her credits kind of died down around the late ’70s and they were all Playboy projects. I actually found more about her present doings than I did her past. She is currently still an active spokesmodel for products and print model available for photoshoots, appearing at conventions around the United States.
l to r: DeDe Lind (Miss August 1967), Helena Antonaccio (Miss June 1969), and Lisa Baker at Glamourcon 2006, from Helena’s official website.
Interestingly, according to the wiki, Ms. Baker now lives in Florida and rooms with fellow retired Playmate DeDe Lind, who is alleged to be one of the most popular Playmates ever, garnering the most bags of mail ever received in the magazine’s history up until the time of her appearance in August, 1967. The two travel to conventions together and appear at local events.
You keep on keepin’ on, girls. God bless ’em!
Photographed by Patrick “Patman” Sun, DragonCon 1998. Judging from her expression and her grip on that alien, I think Ms. Lind may have been over-served at the hotel bar.
“I love old music, old movies, screwball comedies, vintage clothes and basically I’m an old-fashioned gal!”
“Humor is a part of spirituality.”
“You can’t force fun, but you can set up situations where fun will happen to you.”
“I think the people who become the most famous aren’t necessarily these genetic products of the weird American beauty ideal. I mean, all those Playboy bunny types. They’re not filling seats in the theatre.”
Quotable and AWESOME but 100% safe for work? Say what! Hmm. Someone needs to talk to Drew Barrymore about the proper attire for a photoshoot.
The lovely and talented Joan E. Mattis, aka Joni Mattis, Playboy’s Miss November 1960, is noteworthy in the history of the magazine for several things.
First, she was Hugh Hefner’s lover for awhile and also worked for the company for a long time (not so unusual). Not so usually, second, she refused to bare it all for her shoot. You can see from the pictures that, though she was technically nude, she kept specific ladyparts covered by a strategically placed sheet.
During her Playboy photo session, Mattis refused to disrobe, making her (according to her) the least popular Playmate in the history of the magazine. She only received one letter in response to her pictorial, and it was from a clergyman who suggested that she find another line of work. ( the wiki)
From the magazine’s official site:
For nearly four decades, until her untimely death in 1999, another sweetheart of the period, November 1960 Playmate Joni Mattis, was frequently at Hef’s side.
“Our romantic relationship didn’t last very long,” Hef says, “but the friendship did.” Joni was a talent coordinator for his first TV show, Playboy’s Penthouse, an early Playboy Club Bunny, Hef’s West Coast Secretary and, finally, Social Secretary at Mansion West.
With her dark hair and luminous eyes, Joni looked like a porcelain doll, but she had spunk. On one occasion, she not-so-accidentally nudged a potential rival for Hef’s affections, fully clothed in a crepe cocktail dress, into the Chicago Mansion’s swimming pool. The dress immediately shrank. (“Hef’s Special Ladies: Joni Mattis.” Playboy.com)
Fun fact: she was a pocket rocket. 5’2″ and 85 lbs at the time of the shoot, when she was — oh, ho! Looky there. The Playboy stats sheet says, “Unfortunately, this data sheet was incomplete.” No age, ambitions, turn-ons … nothing but the pictures and the raw numbers of her measurements. The total woman of mystery. I guess it was between her and Hef, a couple of crazy Chicago kids in love and running a tasteful skin empire.
Joan died of cancer September 4, 1999. She was only 61.
Photographed by Dwight Hooker.
In the early days of the internet and the design of graphical interface, a cropped version of Miss Sjööblom’s centerfold, famously known as “Lenna,” was the standard test image by which graphic designers measured and compared advances in color, transitions, uniform regions, and sharp edges.
In the early Seventies, an unknown researcher at the University of Southern California working on compression technologies scanned in the image of Lena’s centerfold. Since that time, images of the Playmate have been used as the industry standard for testing ways in which pictures can be manipulated and transmitted electronically.
Over the past 25 years, no image has been more important in the history of imaging and electronic communications, and today the mysterious Lena is considered the First Lady of the Internet (“The Search For Lena: Discovering one Playmate’s role in the history of the Internet,” Playboy Enterprises, 1997).
“The use of her photo is clearly one of the most important events in the history of electronic imaging,” [President of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology Jeff] Seideman said. Image compression is what has made the World Wide Web the wildly popular communications medium it is today.
Seideman adds that he is working with Playboy’s archivist to re-scan Lena’s image and compile all the missing information, including everything from the type of photo emulsion used to make the print to the technical specifications of the scanner.
In this way, Seideman says, the image of this Playboy Playmate can remain the standard reference image for comparing compression technologies into the 21st century.
This is Lena Söderberg these days, pictured with the loveable dork who tracked her down for his imaging conference.
Lena has said that she finds her celebrity status amusing and has made no move to cash in on whatever cache might be got from it. She is content to keep her job working with the handicapped for the government in Stockholm, Sweden and living with her retired husband. Sometimes good things happen to perfectly normal people: what a welcome respite from the would-be reality stars and Paris Hilton wannabes choking up our malls and bars and television sets, desperately clawing at one another for a shot at even thirty seconds of fame. All’s well that ends well!
Playboy’s November 1957 write-up on the lovely and talented Marlene Callahan provoked me to dig a little in to a subject I generally hate, the modern history of Southern California.
Photographed by Vivienne Lapham, a woman. More on her another day, promise.
See, the little blurb about her, which has a grating amount of purple prosaic references to her Irish heritage as though she is from freaking County Cork and not sunny California, which annoys me too much to reproduce it here, I’ll just link to it, also overemphasized her wholesome, small-town upbringing. But my eyebrows raised when I read this was in Ventura.
I don’t think of Ventura as wholesome and oldtimey: I guess I’m tarring it with the brush of my feelings toward more major cities in its vicinity to be guilty and glutted by filthy, phony, decaying greed by association. You know, trash everywhere, traffic jams, cement as far as your eye can see, no one gives a shit about anything but their phone and their fake tan — I just have strong feelings about that area. It offends my eyes. But I don’t have the whole story on it, I told myself, so I decided to look in to Ventura a little. Visions of carhops and mall parking lot mazes dancing in my head, I smugly decided to give this situation the ol’ googly-moogly and see just how “rural” a lass Miss Callahan was in 1957.
Answer: Pretty reasonably freaking rural. In my face!
Not easily accessible, Ventura was not a target of immigrants, and as such, remained quiet and rural. For most of the century which followed the incorporation of Ventura in 1866, it remained isolated from the rest of the state.
From the south, travel by auto was slow and hazardous, until the completion of a four-lane expressway (US Highway 101) over the Conejo Grade in 1959. This route, now further widened and improved by 1969, is known as the Ventura Freeway, which directly links Ventura with the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The wiki reports that in “1950 the population reached 16,643, by 1970 the population was 57,964,” so this spread, photographed in 1957, and its accompanying blurb, were published just as the city’s population and industry were poised to explode due to the freeway’s construction. This town could have really stayed in a kind of innocent, mill-town type isolation (everyone in town relying on the industry of the citrus and nut farming in a symbiotic relationship of trade, labor, and self-sustenance) were it not for the freeway coming through. That is a mindfuck to me.
Of course, it is also the home of what was once the California Fruit Growers Exchange, which grew in quick order in to Sunkist Growers, Inc., a company with a history of up and down labor and ethical practices vis a vis immigrants, other farmers, and influence over politics and land use. (Until today I would have said “fie” upon them, but now I’m just a little up in the air on all kinds of my feelings.) I’m torn and conflicted by this. Being the county seat of an area essentially owned by Sunkist by the ’50’s means that the “innocence” and rurality of the leaders of the town were questionable at best, but the majority of people in the area were just living their lives, doing their best, taking simple pleasures in county fairs and cakewalks.
I’m not supposed to feel compassion or empathy for Southern California and its denizens. I need to go watch Chinatown. Yes, Chinatown needs a movie moment or two. Arg. I’m still going to wander away muttering “Fuckin’ freeways…”
Elizabeth: you pick a year, I’ll do that one today
the Cappy: hmmmmmmmmmm
Elizabeth: any ol’ year, I got ’em all.
the Cappy: 2004
Elizabeth: GREAT CHOICE!
My friendoh the Cappy-bappy is in Baghdad waiting for a plane to Germany, so let’s all help him pass the time, shall we? From MTV’s Road Rules and the Real World and some permutations therein* to the pages of Playboy, super-cutie-patootie Cara Zavaleta is your Miss November 2004!
*I have never seen any of those shows.
The set dressing and conceptual design of most of the November shoots from the early 2000’s were completely lacking in any type of ingenuity. It’s like, the creative types were fired and they just brought in photoshoppers. “Just airbrush her beyond recognition and the background doesn’t matter.” Newsflash: it matters. Also, just because you have an airbrush feature in your photo editing software does not obligate you to use it. Authenticity matters!
And so does a model who is smiling and playing a fun character. Every lady has a little girl inside her that wants to play dress up! Harkening back to the pinup style really helps a model get in to it, it seems. Playboy hit it out of the park for me with this one. This spread is a standout in the shoots from the early 2000’s and it is absolutely adorable.
I have no clue who photographed the adorable oldtimey saloon scenes, but I know exactly who did the Women’s Air Core uniform bookworm-type ones:
Rob Schneider! Super-cool! I’d be grinning if I was her, too! Because this was a much more recent shoot than some of the others I’ve been featuring, there are like truckloads of pictures of this in varying degrees of resolution around the internet, so many that I could not possibly do them all justice, so I’ll wind things down with a classic composition that has all the best fetishistic elements of the shoot. Masculine attire, knee socks (argyle!), book, cigar. Out. of. the. park. Well done!
The lovely and talented Betty Blue, Playboy’s Miss November 1956, has legs that don’t take coffee breaks but lungs that do stop for a smoke or two.
Centerfold photographed by Hal Sims.
This is the only other photo from the shoot. It’s clear from the paint-splattered sleeve that the hand offering the match in both photographs is the artist’s; also, in this shot, you can see more of the charcoal sketch of her on the easel behind her. As Mark Tomlinson has pointed out, the explicit male presence in this photo set makes them slightly uninviting, and it’s one of the last where a man makes an appearance in the picture, rather than being implicit in the photograph’s composition.
I remember when I modeled for an art class, there was always a point where the professor called for the students to turn their easels to the centers, and I, or we, if I was working with another model, got to wrap our sheets around us and shuffle around seeing the drawings. There was this one deaf guy who consistently drew me like a mix between Xena and a ballerina. He was really generous about increasing breast size and upping my level of arm tone. Long story short, that’s how I know the sign for “thank you!”
RIP. She was a good soul, it seems.
Interestingly, Betty is one of the few Playmates who is a permanent resident of the Playboy family. In accordance with her wishes and at the concession of Hef, who always invited her and her husband, AVN-award-winning producer Harold Lime, to events and parties, her ashes were scattered at the grounds of the Playboy mansion in a private ceremony following her death from heart failure in 2000.
This randomly terrible photo of the lovely and talented Roberta Vasquez, Playboy‘s Miss November 1984, makes “1984” scary in new and grotesque ways.
To answer the question we’re all asking: 40D. (the wiki.)
She was a cop in real life and also played one in Clint Eastwood’s The Rookie. I think that centerfold picture is terrifyingly ugly, I’m not sure why it got the nod, unless the editor was one of those guys who fantasizes about women hurting him — not emotionally, I mean, like crushing him to death during sex or something — but she looks better in some of these other shots.
I think this is the nicest one of the lot, but I guess it’s a little too late to vote, huh?
Almost all the pictures from that shoot don’t really look like her, she looks kind of crabby and a little scary. Maybe the photographer was a jerk for the interior stuff. But whoever did the outside work brought out her smile. See how much nicer?
As a final thought, Roberta Vasquez cares deeply about your health. Please watch her workout video and enjoy some retro aerobics. I admit to not watching the whole thing, but I’m sure it’s chock full of good solid nutritional advice and up-and-up shit like that.
So sweet of her to take the time, right?? I tell you. Beneath those mammoth mammaries beats a heart of gold. This girl is a giver, you guys. God bless her.
Super-cute! I love this chick. She promotes video games and has a great sense of humor and is genuinely a geek, not like these phony faux-nerds they sometimes get on G4 and such. She’s rad! She is also, according to the wiki, the first Korean-American playmate, which is pretty cool, too.
Look at how real and adorable that smile is. I think she is almost always honestly laughing in pictures, not any of that coy b.s. that passes for an alleged giggle in some of these shoots.
She just always seems to be having fun, every time I see her in print or on television, and I think that reflects a terrific life outlook and suggests humility and the sense to recognize and appreciate good fortune. Those are great traits for anyone to have, but when you combine them with someone willing to take it all off? Winner winner, chicken dinner!! I don’t mean to gush. Grace Kim is just an all-around great girl in my book.
Dig that giant watch. Love it!!
Finally, funnyordie.com did a spoof of the presidential town hall debates which digitally altered real footage to show Grace and some other playmates asking the candidates questions. Grace’s segment is the best because some of those other bunnies are pretty dumb. (In one of their defense, I admit that “fiduciary” is a hard word to say. You know what else is hard? Math, like, omg!)
Go ahead and watch it but Grace’s part is brief and the whole thing is not that funny, although I’m not suggesting anyone die instead.
Okay, fine, when you put it like that, I guess you can play the drums. Just this once!
Okay, so I gotta go whip up my ambrosia (one of the things I’m taking to today’s chili cookoff!) and flat-iron this mad rad hair of mine. Hopefully I will have time for a Music Moment before I bounce down to Paolo and Miss D’s!
Ladies and gentlemen, the lovely and talented Stephanie Adams, Playboy‘s Miss November 1992, would like to know: Have you got milk?
The Playboy sez:
AMBITIONS:
Elite supermodel, successful actress, get my master’s in business and travel more.
TURN-ONS:
Italian style, strawberries and cream, big cats, fast cars, Nintendo, kisses, and music.
Let’s just explore all that, shall we?
The ambitions section. First of all, yes, though Stephanie Adams was represented by Wilhelmina modeling agency at the time she posed for this centerfold, she was soon after picked up by Elite. She has not been a “successful actress,” but she is a widely known speaker and television personality, and a successful author. Ambition: we’ll call those all a big check.
Moving along to “turn-ons” — there is a well-known turn-on of Miss Adams’, one you might call her entire claim to fame, that is notably absent from this list. Oh, hey, famous bisexual author, what’s up with leaving sexy-ladytimes off the list? Just slip your mind?
Even though she became a spokesmodel for an LGBT fashion line and is still featured on magazine covers as well as a documentary on her life for Women’s Entertainment, Adams prefers to be known simply as “an author”. She continues to make celebrity appearances for Playboy and continues to be a supporter, spokesperson and advocate in the LGBT community by giving speeches for several Gay Prides in New York City, and speaking for organizations such as Out Professionals, Heritage Of Pride and Women’s Alliance.
Adams appeared in numerous Playboy videos, as well as a cameo appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman, and at some point was voted the “Best Lesbian Sex Symbol” in New York City. Soon after ending a long term relationship around that time, Adams was seen around town with notables such as LGBT comedian Marga Gomez and rock star Joan Jett. Adams had often said of her romantic life that she is a “Playboy trapped in a Playmate’s body.” — official website.
She has since said she is not just lesbian, and still dates guys. (She’s married men from time to time, too.) Hey, girl, if you’re open-minded enough to go for it, then get it where you can.
And when you look like her, you can apparently pretty much get it wherever you want.
Ladies and gentlemen, Playboy is happy to present the lovely and talented model, small screen actress, and Gene Simmons’ longtime ladyfriend in the Service of Satan, Shannon Tweed – Miss November, 1981.
UPDATE 6/28/11: Want more on Shannon?, swing by her new post on this blog for more photos and nice quotes, Playmate Revisited: Shannon Tweed.
The former Miss Ottawa Valley won Playmate of the Year in ’82 and even lived with Hef for awhile before hooking up with Gene Simmons, KISS lead vocalist and noted tonguing enthusiast. Unlike most Playmate-rock star hookups, the two seem to have found lasting love, which I think pretty much should never be criticized. Tweed has said of their twenty-seven year monogamous relationship, “He opted never to marry. I opted not to bitch about it.” Seems fair enough to me. That lil blonde Canuck cookie is smarter than she looks, eh?
I just think it is really, really cute that there was a time in North America when we hadn’t all seen Shannon Tweed naked yet.
Almost as cute as how the butt-crack is tastefully blurred in these screencaps. Awww. Thanks for preserving the modesty and integrity of the original photoshoot. That was the one thing that would’ve made these pictures absolute smut, you know? Tea and crumpets! Thank goodness for the censor’s loving hand.
I mean, being into high-brow cinema, I’ve naturally seen a few (merely a scant several, at most) of Shannon Tweed’s intellectual and plot-driven films, but I watch them for the snappy dialogue and well-crafted intrigue. Naturally, I look away in shock during the rare, rare, rare scenes of dishevelment.
“Oh, yeah, I do movies; I forgot. They see them on TV. I forget that anybody knows me. ” — Shannon Tweed
Fun fact: my parents and I went to Ms. Tweed’s early silver screen smash hit Hot Dog the Movie! in the theater. (Tagline: “Taste the sauce … in Hot Dog!“) My dad frog-marched me and my mom out of there after less than half an hour. It was the first time I’d ever walked out of a movie, and I found the power of the experience heady. Like, “Hey, put-upon middle manager at the box office, you expected us to stay in that movie, but we totally did not! And we want to see something else, ’cause that thing was crap!”
I looked forward to someday doing something like that myself, but did not find cause to repeat the event on my own until I saw the live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I felt like the absolute king of the universe when I indignantly stalked out of that piece of grotesque, shrill, memory-raping garbage. And as I stood in the lobby deciding what to watch instead, I remembered the feeling of trespass-mixed-with-righteousness that I had when my father hauled us out of Hot Dog. Thanks, Daddy. You are a huge role model.
Before and After “the incident.”*
*There was no incident. Just cheap ’80s plastic surgery. Sick, sad burn.
Because she hella cares about the earth, Shannon Tweed is now made from 85% post-consumer recyclable parts. Did You Know?
Ladies and gentleman, your Playboy Miss November 1959 — the lovely and talented Donna Lynn. (applause.)
As far as I know the whole shoot was photographed by Frank Bez.
As you can see, Playboy was starting to get their shit together and have a strong budget by this point, enough not to cobble together hack photographers and shitty sets in eight different crummy apartments to put together a single spread. Consistency is important for the overall feel of a shoot. These look like they were all done around the same place, a nice spread of house with a good-sized backyard in some smoggy shithole suburb of L.A.
Art direction was actually beginning to play a part in the magazine’s design and composition. Sex sells. Slickly packaged sex sells better, and for more.
I find it just so unforgivably rude when people screw around on the phone when you are trying to have an in-person social conversation.
Miss Lynn was like bazillions of buxom blondes, a pretty girl who made her way from the midwest to Los Angeles with dreams of being a star. She must have had a smidge of tinfoil and gritty hustle behind that vacuous smile, because she came closer than most, landing not just a plush job and a centerfold spot, but a movie part from a big name, too. The Playboy sez:
Cocktail Waitress on the Sunset Strip In Hollywood even the girls who wait tables are beautiful!
It is news to nobody that Hollywood is the cutie capital of the country, racking up more shapeliness per square inch — or maybe we mean round inch — than any other city in the nation, probably the world. To its sun-drenched purlieus swarm America’s loveliest lasses, all eager for film and TV stardom. Of course, stardom doesn’t usually come overnight and while they’re waiting the hopeful honeys take jobs as waitresses and car hops, cashiers and receptionists — which accounts for the high degree of pulchritude among Hollywood’s hired help. Even in such a splendorous setting, blonde Donna Lynn is a standout. As a waitress, she brightens The Cloister, a smart supper club on Hollywood’s famous Sunset Strip. There recently Mickey Rooney spotted her and signed her up for a part in his new motion picture The Private Lives of Adam and Eve. There recently we spotted her, too, and decided she was just what we’d been seeking for Miss November.
In the imdb’s cast list for the 1960 Rooney flop (guess it must have been one of the ones he drank his way through), she is credited as “Wednesday,” along with several other cast members named for days of the week. Her next part is listed, bizarrely, as “10 year old girl” a decade later on a 1971 episode of The Partridge Family, which I’m going to chalk up to a mistake.
Tan lines are like highlights for what you are not ordinarily allowed to see. Ladies, STOP laying in the booths naked. Way more hot to be stripey.
In fact, the credits her file at imdb lists from that point really take a nosedive in believable accuracy, so I’m assuming there was some kind of huge mistake in identity, because I seriously doubt that in 1981, having been born in 1936, she was in any shape to play “Kiki” in Hollywood High II (“It’s the end of the semester and finals are near, but that doesn’t stop the girls of Hollywood High from having fun. From the pool to the beach, they cavort with their boyfriends, drink, and smoke a joint or two!”). Her final alleged credit is 1988’s Hollywood’s New Blood, a horror film about which one imdb user commented, “A nursery school pageant is more professional.”
Malibu? Laguna?
Here she is, back in 1959 where we can be sure it was she, and reasonably clad to boot, washing a pretty freaking sweet indeedy Renault Dauphine; they did not always make teeny cars built to demolish one another jostling for parking on the streets of Paris. Even the French automaking industry was in the post-WWII car manufacturing heyday a decophilic slave to the beautiful trappings of finned and glorious car architecture.
Marvel of design. Car’s okay, too.
Hef & Co. were also very concerned with the physiology of sleep and how well you were resting, evinced by the cover theme. (That bunny looks twisted. Dude is toe up. I hate when people get animals drunk!)
The lovely and talented Barbara Cameron, Playboy November 1955’s Playmate of the month, cover shot by Arthur James.
The picture that was selected by Playboy’s editor as the centerfold was so bad in my opinion, such a disservice to the hokey, natural, kind of amicably donkey-faced, toothy beauty of Barbara Cameron…
Shitty, unflattering photo by Lawrence Tirschel.
…that I absolutely, categorically had to include the rest of the shots from her feature.
It’s hard to believe it is even the same woman. What a difference when she is in an environment and with a photographer with whom she was comfortable enough to really smile.
I think she had a genuine playfulness that comes across in these black and white shots, by whomever they are, than the stiffness screaming from her postures in that godawful centerfold picture by Tirschel and the only moderately better cover photo by Arthur James.
Cute, right?
That could be Santa Monica or it could be Montauk, I truly have no idea. Playboy was still on the East Coast at that time, I think. So probably more like the Jersey shore, but there is practically no way of telling.
Long story short, these b&w beach shots are sooo much better, right? They barely look like they were taken at the same time of the year, and I don’t even know if they were done by the same photographer (I suspect not). There is basically zero info on Barbara Cameron, the model, on the internet, though ironically info on conservative Christian author Barbara Cameron, the mother of Kirk and Candace — of Growing Pains and Full House, respectively — abounds. Heh. I’m so immature for laughing about that.
“Prior to September 1959, Playboy did not ask Playmates to complete Data Sheets. ” — Official Playmate Directory (extremely exceedingly not at all safe for work unless you want to get fired and then SET ON fire if you have a female boss)
I assume it was a fake name and the real details of the model are lost to the ages, which is a shame because she has a kind of genuine, athletic, self-deprecating charm that lacks in a lot of these faux-coy pinups. If you know anything about her, holler.
NSFW November Inaugural Edition – Diane Hunter, the first Miss November, Playboy, 1954. And a redhead, no less.
The lovely and talented Diane Hunter’s official website states that she has the distinction of being the only living model to have appeared in the very first issue of Playboy, in December 1953. A popular pinup model, she was highly sought to pose for art, too, perhaps due in part to her strong resemblance to legendary burlesque star Tempest Storm, who was out of Hollywood at the time and hiding out in my husband’s hometown with her gangster boyfriend to avoid umpteen contracts for mob hits from Mickey Cohen down in L.A. It always comes back to dirty, filthy, Porno Portland, doesn’t it?
Anyway, having appeared in the debut issue of Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold of sorts (official centerfolds didn’t really start until ’54), Diane came back to the magazine to pose as the centerfold for November 1954.
According to the wiki, the average payout for a centerfold appearance at this time was around $500. Personally, I think that’s pretty good money.
“Retired and single these days, Diane lives on Social Security, odd jobs and whatever money she earns off of her photos. She enjoys life and loves to hear from her fans.” — Official Site
Her real name is Gale Rita Morin, and yes, you can email her any ol' time to request autographed pictures or just shoot the breeze: GaleRMorin@aol.com. “All photos are 8″x10″ and sell for $20, each hand signed by Diane Hunter. Send a SASE or include $4 for postage” (thus spake the official site).
Here’s a couple of recent pictures to wind things down.
I think that is some impressive staying power and I hope you think the same. God bless the good lord and the old habit of corset training: the woman looks awfully damned good for 75 and seems to have kept a sunny outlook. Good on her. I’m feeling more cheerful about this month already.
November is my least favorite month. Well, I’m not high on January, either, actually. They are both just such drags, coming off of the high of October and December, respectively. Bleah. You may remember that I have a philosophy about dealing with downers, vis a vis boobs and their efficacious curing powers therein.
‘Naked November’ by Gabrielle Chiapparini on flickr
I’ve decided to put that theory in to large play all this month, while exploring ideas about changing views of women’s sexuality, including mine. So welcome to NSFW November! Every day this month, I’ll be spotlighting Miss Novembers of Playboys past; it’s easier than searching out autumny-fancy-pants amateurs and, since I felt compelled to go commercial on this idea, part of pursuing that will be to explore the compulsion.
(Farewell, artistic free-spirited amateur nudes; I am switching over to commercial bullshit for the month. FOR SCIENCE.)
Maybe the interesting stuff to come out of this will be ideas about the photographs’ compositions, thoughts on the lady in question’s body shape, details of the model’s later contributions to society, or even factoids about the magazine itself at that time. We’ll see, yes?
Playboy: Isn’t there an old show-business rule about not acting with children or animals?
Tina Fey: That’s right. They will upstage you because they’re adorable. The same can be said of Amy Poehler. I shouldn’t have acted with Poehler. She climbs everything and curls up in your lap, and she’s cuter than babies. Playboy: That’s a pretty bold statement.
Tina Fey: Amy Poehler is cuter than a baby and a monkey combined.
I did not much care for the movie Baby Mama; maybe my expectations of it were too high. Trouble is, my husband and I watched it on television a few days before we separated (come to think of it, it may have been only hours), so I can’t say anything for sure about my opinions of what I viewed during that time period. Except that Forgetting Sarah Marshall is NOT a good movie to watch when you’re waiting for the right moment to ask for a split — I am pretty sure that is a unilateral truth that we were merely unlucky enough to stumble upon the actual experience of but that everyone can agree is nonetheless for-sure-solid in terms of epiphanies, without having to personally go through it.
In the past few weeks, I’ve started talking to some of my friends — specifically Miss D and Jonohs because they are tricksie and ask the tough questions in mild and genuinely curious and empathetic enough ways that I don’t get startled and run screaming down to Mexico to avoid admitting that I actually feel Ways about Things — more about the separation, more about our time together, and even have talked more to my husband, and I’d pushed aside all those things for so long that I guess I must have started to fool myself that everything was okay.
It is not.
The horrible is beginning to set in as an all new breed of horrible, and congruently the panic is a different and infinitely deeper kind of panic. And I am afraid, and sometimes lonely, though it is self-induced isolation because it’s more like a desperate last-ditch effort at avoidance than loneliness. I can’t talk to my family about it because they are involved, and also frankly very pushy and aggressive people, and I tend to approach a problem far more tentatively than they do. To them, you just snap your fingers and you should know what you think and what to do next. I’m not that way, I need time before I am able to come to any conclusions about things. My feelings freak me out and I spook easily. I need a peaceful solo drive in the country or else a boisterous day of booze and ball to work through my emotions. Thank god a) it’s Autumn and my car is running. b) that the World Series is coming up. c) for my friends and their literally ’round the clock support of me.
I first wrote this looking back over my weekend and thinking of the time I spent with Paolo, Miss D, Geo, Corinnette, and Jonohs, and right then I was checking facebook for the first time in a day and was reminded that Panda Eraser put up a Batman on my wall for me, and Milo and Cinder keep inviting me over, and then I got a message from the Gentleman saying that if we change our minds and want soup, let him know, because kidlet and I are having a Sick Day. I am so ridiculously lucky to have such wonderful friends. If I’ve been avoiding anyone reading this or you haven’t heard from me in a bit, it’s probably because I was afraid if I talked to you I’d start crying and babbling about feelings, but if you don’t like getting avoided, then remind me I can suck it and better stop it! Make me talk, people, I’m a frigging powder keg over here.
The Thought Experiment 
