As a part of its 50th anniversary, Playboy held a series of parties in major cites across the country, San Francisco was the final one. The great thing was that they sold tickets to the public. Now every guy has a secret desire to meet the playmates, so when I saw that I had a chance to do just that, I immediately got my ticket.
Of course, with the size of the crowd and the fact that the place was so loud you couldn't talk, all you could really do was get an autograph and have your picture taken with them, which I did. Well they are real people, they're not larger than life. They are all nice looking gals, but if you saw them on the street in normal attire, they wouldn't seem so out of the ordinary. Their outfits are, by today's standards, really are rather demur, but some of the gals in the crowd were really hot, as I think you can see from the pictures. Most of them had VIP badges and I wonder where they all came from. Most of the gals were eager to have their pictures taken. How about the two gals in dressed in pink, I was one of about ten guys all lined up taking their pictures.
But one of the Playmates had something special about her. From the pictures below, I think that you can guess which one I am talking about. It is not that she is more striking or glamorous than the others, but she has a kind of natural magic that is hard to describe. The only other place that I have seen anything like it was in a Marilyn Monroe movie that I once saw. I have tried to find out what else I could about her and I am not the first to make the comparison with Miss Monroe. My favorite of the photos, the one to the left of the one where she poses with me, says more than I could put into words.
I took these photos with my Minolta point and shoot digital camera. I didn't know if they would even allow photography, but it wasn't a problem. If I had it to do over, I would take one of my Speed Graphics. Photography conditions were terrible. The crowd was too packed and it kept moving around making it hard to get a good composition, many times I saw things that I just wasn't fast enough to get. The light level was so low that the camera's monitor did not register, but it was still so bright that it made it hard to see through the optical finder. I often cut off feet or other things I wanted. Most of the images posted are cropped from larger photos and brightness and contrast had to be reworked in PhotoShop to look like anything. With all that, I am lucky to get what I did. Some of Lani's pictures are cropped so much that sharpness really suffers, but her magic still shines through.
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