hanh, dave, rob and i went last night to a birthday party for someone i didn’t know. it was an interesting house; there were star wars sheets covering the windows, there was a shirtless bart simpson on top of the television, and in the living room there hung a giant poster of bernadette peters with a pickle on her neck. taped to the tile in the bathroom was a newspaper advertisement for an overnight bus tour of mexican bordellos.
hanh and i weren’t feeling particularly social, so we settled in on the couch with a playboy magazine we’d found in a stack near the fireplace. this particular issue of playboy was from december of 1968, and on the cover was a (naked) woman wearing a (really frumpy) dress made out of christmas lights. we started to flip through it, thinking that it’d be pretty interesting to see some sixties naked chicks. “think about it,” i said to hanh, “the girls in this magazine are now, like, fifty!”
as it turns out, playboy’s changed a lot since 1968. we were ninety-two pages in before anyone was naked. we kept flipping through letters and cartoons and cigarette ads and liquor ads and articles and more ads until we finally got to our first naked chicks, and once we got there we discovered that they were much different from the ones that are around now. (as a result of a postal accident, i get playboy in the mail every month. it’s addressed to someone else, sure, but who am i not to flip through it?) for starters, the poses were much more demure than they are today; the women were twisted away from the camera and hidden behind various things. in the case of the “girls of the orient” spread, they were hidden in tall grasses and behind huts, but don’t get me started about that. and it was scary to see how much more realistic the ideal woman’s figure was in 1968. “if we keep this up,” hanh said, “the girls in playboy from 2050 are going to be even more disgusting.”
from there we flipped through eighty more pages of ads and cartoons and articles, and thus ended our experience with the playboy of the sixties – the playboy of six dollar subscription cards and five-dollar tshirts. “this,” i said, dropping the magazine back on its stack near the fireplace, “is why larry flynt invented hustler.”
also, i have never heard of this movie, but i’m in it as a character, it seems.