The Plaster Casters were a group of girls from
Chicago,
Illinois who, in the late
sixties, garnered a bit of
fame for themselves through their unique brand of
groupie art. The Casters, whose central member was a girl named
Cynthia Albritton, would meet rock stars
backstage or in
hotel rooms and
immortalize their most private of parts with the help of a little
calcium alginate (used for making
dental impressions) and some
strokes of encouragement.
The seedling of
inspiration for this now semi-
legendary practice was planted when 19 year old Cynthia's
art professor gave his students some weekend
homework. The assignment was to make a plaster cast out of "anything
solid." To Cynthia, who was a
virgin and more than a little
frustrated, the ideal subject for casting was immediately obvious:
Penis. During this time, the 60's groupie
subculture and so-called
sexual revolution were prevalent and in full swing. Cynthia and her friends wanted
in on the action. Toting a bagful of casting materials to a
Paul Revere and the Raiders concert, they managed to maneuver their way backstage. And though she didn't get a mold of any of the band that weekend, Cynthia did manage to lose her virginity to
Mark Lindsay, the
lead singer, which had been her
ulterior motive anyway. Pretty soon, the girls were passing out 'calling cards' to bands, offering their services.
It took a lot of
trial and error to come up with a
suitable substance for molding. The mold material had to be
pliant enough to capture the penis shape well, yet
harden strong enough to keep that
shape when plaster was poured into it for setting. Initial casting endeavors involved making molds out of melted
wax, wet
sand,
clay and (no lie)
aluminum foil. Cynthia finally stumbled upon dental alginates and with a bit more practical experience, the casters were eventually able to perfect their art. Their first successful casting with alginates was of none other than
Jimi Hendrix.
This is from a Diary entry following the
Jimi Hendrix Experience:
We needed a ratio of 28:28 and found this barely sufficient. He has got just about the biggest rig I've ever seen! We needed to plunge him through the entire depth of the vase. In view of all these dodgy precedents, we got a BEAUTIFUL mold. He even kept his hard for the entire minute. He got stuck, however, for about fifteen minutes (his hair did) but he was an excellent sport-didn't panic ... he actually enjoyed it and balled the impression after it had set. In fact, I believe the reason we couldn't get his rig out was that it wouldn't GET SOFT! ... A beautiful (to say the least) mold with part of a ball and some random embedded hairs. Dig this - the plaster cast was a flop. Delores got uptight and didn't mix enough and then after she'd gotten it set into the mold, she got anxious to get the finished product out before it was finished and so it all crumbled. But it was kept intact in its crumbled heap for a couple of days and it subsequently dried together and was only broken in three divisions ... A little Elmer's Glue and we had our plaster cast-a little on the Venus de Milo side, but it's real beauty.
Jimi's is reportedly the biggest cast in Cynthia's
collection with
Peter Tork of
The Monkees coming in a close second.
Erect cocks were preferable (for
aesthetic purposes or
just for the fun of it, I'm not sure which) and mixing the molding substance was a process which required attention to detail in order to get the
consistency & timing just right. So the girls developed a
system in which Cynthia would mix the alginates while her partner(s) took on the job of '
plater,' bestowing
blow jobs and other
stimuli to keep the model at attention while the molding
goop was prepared and applied.
At a
Cream concert one night,
Eric Clapton introduced
Frank Zappa to the girls. And though he himself was never plaster cast,
Zappa was highly impressed by the 'art' of what the girls did. He became for them a
benefactor of sorts; taking them around, introducing them to bands. He even attempted (unsuccessfully) to get their casts into art
exhibits. What had started out as merely a
ploy "to
get laid" by band members was now being accepted by many as a
valid art form.
Gene Simmons of
KISS wrote a song about Cynthia called
Plaster Caster. Simmons was never cast though. His song is based purely on
wishful thinking.
Today, Cynthia still does castings of band's members. Recent additions to the collection include
Ronnie Barnett of
The Muffs and
Jello Biafra, member of
The Dead Kennedys. She's even added her first female bits to the collection with the casting of
L7 vocalist
Suzi Gardner's breasts. She calls this upstart her '
tit wing.'
In July of 2000,
New York's
Thread Waxing Space held an exhibit of Cynthia's casts. A documentary about Cynthia and the girls entitled
Plaster Casters was released in 2001.