Chris, who sat next to me in my Grade 9
homeroom, was deep in the throes of
Farrahmania. His favorite
t-shirt had, on it, a large reproduction of her top-selling
pin-up poster. He'd say "Pssst! Look!" and proceed to squeeze her "
tit".
I never had a pin-up. My childhood showbiz crushes - Geraldine Chaplin, Charlotte Rampling, Nancy from ZOOM, Penny Peyser, etc - weren't exactly items in the pin-up market, plus I was never the mallrat type to go shopping for posters; my hangouts were bookstores.
I think I'd met some members of the Peyser family, back before Penny was on TV (The Tony Randall Show, BTW, a great MTM sitcom of the 70s) - Peter Peyser (uncle? father? I forget) was a congressman representing my occasional neck of the woods of NYC, or maybe an adjacent district. I figured that trumped a mere poster, even if it was the wrong Peyser, and even if I was, to them, just some anonymous snot-nosed kid taking up space on the campaign trail.
Actually, I did have a pin-up. Pelé. Nothing sexual, I'm afraid. (Am I disappointing you?) It came as a bonus from a soccer magazine. A poster of him, in Santos or Brazil colors (minus logos), in mid-air doing a bicycle kick. Brought to you by your friends at Puma, whose logo wasn't airbrushed out. Oh, and I had a poster of the AMC Pacer ("do you think that was sexual, doctor?").
I was never brave enough to attempt a bicycle kick, though I did get some of my other striker's skills from watching Pelé. The Pacer (and American Motors Corporation) was a dead issue (I think) by the time I got my first car, the hippiewagon - but the drummer in a band I was in owned one; when it (somehow) functioned, it was that band's back-up vehicle.
Where is Penny Peyser? Where is Nancy? And damn that Jean-Michel Jarre! He stole my Charlotte!
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