Former Playboy writer on writing Playmates

Posted at 12:15 PM Oct 21, 2009

By Andrea Grimes

Today on Open: Salon, there's an article from Some Dude who used to write for Playboy. He would like you to know that those Playmates were fucking stupid. He, on the other hand, had an English degree and drank a lot of martinis, which puts him somewhere between ice cream and Jesus on the awesome scale. His job was to interview Playmates for the blurbs next to their pictures.

In fact, it was so painful that, when your turn came around, you would do your best to avoid it. It was a form of torture that was still pending in Geneva. And mostly, it was fiction. Fiction is generally fun to write, but you have to have characters and a plot.

Most of these women were blank slates with cleavage. I don't mean to criticize them too harshly -- they were just too young to have had much worldly experience. Unlike them, I had survived many years of hard living, having just graduated from college with a degree in English.

It was SO HARD, ya'll! SRSLY, not one of these ladies had an English degree OR drank a lot of martinis:

On one occasion -- I think it was my interview with Miss July -- I actually dozed off for a few seconds. Maybe it was the six martinis I'd consumed the night before. Maybe it was the neverending story she told me about her glass unicorn collection.

Anyway, after the interview, you'd try to locate a theme among all this babble and write a coherent story, which you'd have to seriously embellish, although it was mandatory to keep more-or-less to the truth.

But did anyone think to ever give him Pulitzer for his hard work? The hard work that came after he got an English degree and drank a lot of martinis?

No! Especially not after the time he met ... A WOMAN WITH A MASTER'S DEGREE.

I was assigned a Playmate who'd gotten a Masters Degree. I had no clue what her field of study was, and I was afraid to ask. But she was educated, so I called Shel and told him how literate she was and that maybe it would be a fun idea if she wrote her own Playmate copy. He thought about it for a moment -- realizing full well that this was clearly an attempt by me to get out of writing it myself -- and said... "okay."

She did a splended job too. I'd never read Playmate copy that was entirely about Proust, but there's a first time for everything.

I'm just so happy for this dude that he's moved on from "driveling nonsense" about beautiful women to "driveling nonsense" about himself. Truly, the world would be a worse place without the sentence, "I had survived many years of hard living, having just graduated from college with a degree in English."