It Was Better As A Memory

I used to have on my Amazon wish list the coffee-table book Playboy put out featuring what they considered the best of their 50 years of photography. I was curious, in part, to see what they thought the best of their stuff was. Lots of film in fifty years, lots of celebs, etc.

I like Playboy, too, as a sort of cultural timecapsule. There's magazines that could fill that niche in some respects, but most are the sort of magazine no one keeps. It's a lot harder to find a 1999 issue of 'Wired' than it is to find a 1969 issue of Playboy. Fashion, expensive toys, fads, the left take on national news with no holds barred, these are things Playboy documents well.

So I always thought it would be a cool book to have, at least if I didn't have to spend the coin on it.

I requested it through interlibrary loan from my public library, just to see what would happen, and it came in. Ha! Well, most of it did. There are some pages ripped out, presumably someone's sentimental favorite. But there was a picture I'd swear I saw in the magazine back in the 1980s, Tina Louise. Yeah, Ginger, the role she's never lived down entirely. I could swear she'd posed for Playboy, presumably before she was on the TV show. I recall this photo being in there for some retrospective or other.

She's not even in the index, so she didn't make the 50 year cut. Sophia Loren did, so did Kim Basinger, Sharon Stone, etc. Hef's ex-wives, of course. The famous Marilyn shot that launched the magazine in a lot of ways.

So I went out online thinking maybe I'd find the shot I remembered of Tina Louise. Just for curiosity.

This is it, and I knew as soon as I saw it that I'd remembered it wrong. My teenage mind must have raised the skirt a few more inches.