Celebrities on the Newsstand

[Alfred Urrutia]

--- Dan Stiffler <calendar-girls@mindspring.com> wrote:

> Alfred, the deal is that I know you care.  After all, you hooked up Victoria
> Valentino's stereo system, or some such thing.  Of course you care.  And
> PLAYBOY should be for the man, like you, who cares about the playmate *and*
> her story.  Those other guys?  Why should PLAYBOY cater to them?  Why should
> PLAYBOY be just another simple stroke book?

Ok, I can go with that.  By why can't it be both?  Playmate for the guy who
cares, celebrity pictorial for the others?  And if the celebrity pictorial is
handled in a similar was as the Playmate's, I mean in the interview/backstory
sense, it could actually handle both groups of guys to a degree.

> I get your point, Alfred.  And maybe I am making too much of the difference.
> It's just a different that has always meant a lot to me and, I suspect, to
> others for whom the playmate is PLAYBOY's most distinctive and valued
> feature.
> 
> Even so, you are learning that Jennifer Garner took those ballet lessons
> *after* you have known her as a celebrity.  In our culture, as
> celebrity-sick as it is, that labels Jennifer Garner, even stigmatizes and
> colors the perception of her.  She becomes an "oh, isn't that?"  Many
> celebrities will tell you that their fame has come at the great cost of
> personal freedom and individuality.
> 
> With Tiffany Taylor, we learn about her ferrets when we *first* meet her.
> For me at least, this is a more natural way to develop a relationship.
> Steve Sloca, with his comments on my distinction between the celebrity
> fantasy and the playmate fantasy, is pretty much on the mark.

I guess it's more a matter of degree, then.  How big is the separation
in time between story and stardom, I mean.

Many of the Maxim type mags are going out of their way to be first to
feature the "unknown" celebrities.  By that I mean the girl who's just
gotten her first role in a movie (one of the mags has some blond girl,
*really* pretty, who was in "Bad Boys 2", I think, and she'd done
nothing before that, so the story and stardom are happening at the
same time) or is just showing up on the radar. Obviously there is more
interest in more known celebrities for most people. But I was blown
away, just knocked out, but FHM's few pics of Mayra Veronica, a
complete unknown to me because I never watch Univision Television.
Apparently she's a host on it.  Anyway, I went to their website and
ordered her calendar. She's as known or knowable to me as a Playmate
and just as hot.  I don't know, maybe I notice those girls more when
they show up in lad mags.

And, technically, if you see a preview pic of next month's Playmate in
the back of Playboy or on the website or you see some reference to her
on a list touting her as being a Playmate 4 months from now, well,
she's at the same level of "stardom" as Hot New Actress or whatever a
listing might be in Maxim.

> Alfred, you live in LA, so maybe the distinction doesn't seem so great to
> you.  But I will share with you a personal story that may make my point more
> clear and more real.  It may also make it completely idiosyncratic, but I am
> guessing that there are many more stories like mine.

I have to remember where I live because you're right, the distinction
isn't so great here.  I remember watching Kathy O'Malley doing back
flips at Hooters when she worked there (just for a couple of months)
before she took off in the NSS direction.  I was completely
unsurprised that she said she'd shot for Playboy (I'd already seen the
NSS she did the cover for a day before).  It's just sort of normal for
this city.  The cool parts, anyway.  Not much of that happening in the
Valley, you see, but in Hollywood, the Westside and the beach cities
it's more common.  But seeing Marilu Henner walk out of a rock club on
Sunset or seeing Steve Vai standing in line for soda at a movie
complex in Sherman Oaks is something I'm getting more and more used
to.

> Now let me tell you something straight.  This true love of mine was absolute
> playmate material.  She had a beautiful face and a voluptuous body.  Indeed,
> in our high-school yearbook, she is the girl who featured in a full-color
> two-page spread, in the city park down by the river, wearing a two-piece
> swimsuit.  Not the cheerleader.  My girlfriend (soon to be former-).  She
> was amazing: beautiful and smart.  Of course so was the cheerleader.
> 
> You see Alfred, I could have probably had a good relationship with the
> cheerleader, but her celebrity status always got in my way.  With the
> Woolworth's check-out girl, well, I was the stock boy.  We met on equal
> terms.  It is my contention that PLAYBOY is at its best when it appeals to
> its readers on those terms.  Sure, the playmate is incredibly beautiful and
> has a killer body, but if she is presented as the girl next door, without
> celebrity trappings, you just might wake up one day and realize that, all
> along, you have been working next to *your* playmate.
> 

I suppose that could be the root difference.  The celebrity status,
however it came about or at what level it was, wouldn't bother me in
that way.

I fell in love with the girl of my dreams in 5th grade.  She was and
has always been *my* Playmate in that sense.  Any girl I see is
compared to her.  Not just her looks, which are without question, but
her personality and intelligence and the rest.  Unfortunately we never
went out but my whole life has been looking at girls through that one
filter.  So maybe that's why the celebrity thing doesn't affect me so
much, if at all.  Because I don't rank girls in that way, it's not
important to me, I rank them in terms of how close they get to that
internal ideal I've had since grade school.  So when you see me react
with dry-mouth awe at a GC or something, it's not because the model is
famous or anything, it's because, wow, she's as amazing as the girl I
first fell in love with.  And there ain't many of *those* on this
planet, I've come to find.





Alfred.

=====
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"When you're surrounded by midgets with hammers, you know
 you're going to get a pounding."
 - Triple-H, on how horror movies can help you to evaluate
   real life dangers.
Alfred Urrutia                     rampagingsloth@yahoo.com