If this doesn't attract at least some male interest, then I'm a worse marketer than I thought.
Is it just me, or do they not make Playboy playmates-of-the-month the way they used to?
Pictured above is Paige Young, Miss November, 1968. She died in 1974 of an overdose of sleeping pills. But boy, in November 1968, when I had just turned 13, was she hot! The kind of airbrushed fantasy that we junior high school boys of that era would ogle together, huddling in the bushes of the canyon across the street from our school with a copy of Playboy that one of us had swiped from his Uncle Sid's den. (Ever notice how in those days, uncles with easily-pilfered collections of Playboy were generally named "Sid?")
Had sweet Paige not died in such an untimely manner when I was in college, bless her heart, she'd be about 61 now. (And probably the hottest 61-year-old you ever saw.)
That is correct. The dream girls of my youth are now either grandmothers or dead.
After sadly learning the fate of poor, doomed Paige, I looked up one of her colleagues from my boyhood, Barbara Hillary. Barbara was Playboy's Miss April for 1970. She adorned my bedroom wall when I was in the ninth grade, until my father made me take her down.
She's 59 now, and was last seen doing charitable work in the Philippines with cataract victims.
In those heady days when I was fighting acne and cruising the underground world of late-night sex-via-masturbation with the likes of Paige and Barbara, girls who posed for Playboy were usually aspiring actresses willing to rip their clothes off for some publicity.
I don't know what devils drove pretty Paige to her ignominous date with barbituates, but Barbara apparently had no showbiz ambitions. (She was from Alaska, by the way, if that has any relevance nowadays.)
For whatever reasons, Barbara Hillary, 1970's Miss April, shucked her clothes, had her 15 minutes of fame, adorned God-knows how many ninth-graders' bedroom walls, and went her merry way.
Good for Barbara. Sorry for Paige, and for Dorothy Stratten and Anna Nicole Smith and all the others who either self-destructed or had help. Being a Playboy playmate, like any other form of fame, is obviously a two-edged sword that has to be handled carefully. Some do it well, some don't. If you live long enough, you get to be old. If you don't, you get to be a good-looking corpse. Ave, atque vale.
If this isn't sufficient to put a guy in an autumnal frame of mind...
Actually, I'm not in an autumnal frame of mind. That might come as a surprise, seeing as how this is the time of year when a lot of people are in the mood for it. Christmas is over; it's the dead of winter (61 Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. yesterday) and the Super Bowl is a month away. It's that suicide time of year. People with Seasonal Affective Disorder are missing the sun and clubbing themselves with Jim Beam.
Of course, that's only around here. I have friends in South Africa, where it is at this moment high summer. But I'm sure they have their own things to be depressed about.
But me? I'm fine. I turned 53 in October, but that's okay. On the whole I'm healthier than I was at 26. I'm taking two antidepressants; I'm reasonably focused and have sufficient energy if not a surfeit of it. I published a book last spring and I'm working on another one. My wife Valerie gave me a really fabulous Christmas present: she's converting the basement of our house into a library for me, complete with bookshelves, flat-screen TV, rack stereo, furniture, the whole nine yards.
Two of my own paintings hang on the wall down there -- I took up oil painting last summer.
All in all, not a picture of a guy getting ready to shoot himself. Still, something in me wishes I could go and track down Barbara Hillary and maybe Christine Coren (Miss March, 1970). Hopefully they're both alive. I'd like to invite both of them to Washington and take them both to lunch at once. Picture it: these two (hopefully well-preserved) grandmothers and me, noshing on shrimp cocktail at the Old Ebbit Grill three blocks from the White House, having a colloquy on coping with Scoundrel Time. And drinking a memorial toast to beautiful, doomed Paige Young.
This time of year (in the northern hermisphere, anyway) is traditionally given over to evaluation and reassessment, which is why so many of us end up making those lists of New Years' resolutions which we keep until, oh, January 3rd. I'm not going to bother with that this year; the truth is I usually don't. I know myself well enough to know that there's no amount of self-tut-tutting that's going to get me to change my ways unless a real alarm bell goes off -- like finding out last year that my weight was up to 214. THAT got me on a diet, let me tell you.
I was down to 187 last September, back up to 191 two months later. But I'm determined never to see 200 again, let alone 214. Who knows? Maybe with the new year I'll actually be able to get my ass back to the gym that hasn't seen me since the November election.
Resolutions, no. But reassessment and evaluation, yes. And because, to paraphrase the late Robert Graves, the god of the new year just slew the god of the old and the ghosts of ancient Roman Saturnalia can be imagined romping among the ruins of the Colisseum, it's time to slap Edith Piaf on the old CD player and see what "Non, je ne regrette riens" inspires me to think.
I'll tell you what. It inspired me to think that the song reflects so much bravado. Is there really anyone among us who has nothing they regret?
Speaking for myself alone, I have quite a laundry list of things I regret. And I can think of no better time of year to annoy everybody I know with it. The usual offer applies, all you folks out there in blog-land. You are more than welcome to make up your own list of things that the Catholic liturgy calls "What I have done and what I have failed to do" ... and share.
Here are some of mine:
1. I regret never having gotten a graduate degree. I've been fussing for more than 30 years about this one. (In fairness to me, I did apply to a couple of MFA programs last year and the year before, at Eastern Washington University and the University of Maryland. Both turned me down. May the Terps never win another division title.)*
2. While we're discussing education, I wish I had tried harder, both in high school and college, to get good grades. But I was always more grasshopper than ant, and paid the price for it.
3. And while we're discussing discipline, I regret that I never had enough of it to learn a foreign language, (although I did study Portuguese when I lived in Brazil, and Russian when in Moscow) or play a musical instrument.
4. When I was in high school I had a weekend job pumping gas. Teenagers did that in those days. One Saturday afternoon I said something really stupid to an old lady and offended the daylights out of her. I still get hot flashes thinking about it, even though she's probably been dead for 30 years.
5. At some point when I was growing up, I should have stood up to my father and invited him to go ahead and slug me like he was always threatening to do, then called the cops and had his ass thrown in the jug for assault and battery. I doubt if he ever would have laid a finger on me again.
6. I regret my first marriage. Chris and I got married for the wrong reasons, and in the face of any number of warning bells that only trouble lay ahead. Dumb.
7. And while we're on the subject of marriage, I regret not having married Anna Predeina, the sweetest, prettiest and most adorable girl in all of Russia, when I had the chance to. I let her get away.
8. I regret having wasted 14 years of my life in the U.S. Department of State. They had me stuck in a stupid, menial job and despite my best efforts to move on to something better within the Department, seemed determined to keep me there. I should have smelled the coffee after two or three years and moved on.
9. Related to that, I regret not having persevered in radio news. I gave radio two years and then chucked it and went off to join the government. Radio was a heck of a lot of fun, if the pay was a disgrace. I have pretty good pipes and I'm a reasonably-competent journalist. I know I could have ended up with ABC or CNN radio if I'd stuck with it.
10. I wish I had gone out for baseball in high school. I love baseball, but once I had reached the upper age limit for Little League, I never played again. I steered clear of sports in high school in order to vex my father, with whom I did not get along. And I probably wouldn't have been much of a ballplayer, but maybe junior varsity. Who knows?
11. I wish I hadn't taken it so hard when Jamie Hartshorn dumped me to marry Michael Damer in 1985. That was what drove me into the foreign service, so that gives me two things to regret. Looking back, getting shed of her was the second best thing that ever happened to me. (The first best was being forced to quit the State Department in 1999.)
12. I regret not having stood up to a stupid, skinny, poorly-educated government jerk-off named Richard Allen in 1989 when he got in my face at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia. Instead of backing down, I should have invited him to swing and then promptly had his sorry ass fired. (See #5, above.)
13. I regret that, as a result of a breach with my father in 1996, when my mother died in 2000 I hadn't seen her in more than four years.
14. I sometimes regret the two subjects that were my college majors: journalism and history. They're fine subjects, but sometimes I feel that I "copped out" in not pursuing a literary major and then going on to teach. On the other hand, when I see what peckerheads some professors I know turned out to be (and he knows who he is), I'm glad I steered clear of academia.
15. I regret that it took me until age 52 to really plunge into painting. I had dabbled in watercolors a few times over the years, but I never knew how much fun painting could be until I decided that it didn't matter whether I could draw or not (I can't) and took up the oils.
16. I regret that the Weekliner newspaper, published in Arlington, VA, crashed and burned after only three issues. I was managing editor, and until I got into a barroom brawl with the stupid hillbilly who was bankrolling the project, I was having the time of my life. But the issue over which we fought was the paper's last issue anyway.
17. I often regret never having had children. But just as often don't.
18. I regret never having served an internship in journalism when I was an undergraduate at San Diego State. That postponed my first newspaper job by at least two years.
19. I regret having been churlish enough, at age eight, to return the candy cane my fourth-grade teacher gave me at our class Christmas party rather than acquiesce to my mother's demand that I go and thank her for it. None of the other kids were saying thank-you; why should I be the only one, was my thought? My mother was so upset she started to cry, and I felt so guilty I went back later intending to say thank-you to Miss Seabrook, but she had gone home.
20. I regret having spent so much time regretting things.
Bring on 2009. I have a book to finish.
*In anything. Not even squash, synchronized swimming or hot dog-eating. Man, I'm bitter.
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