Playboy puts some clothes on

(692 words)

Playboy’s decision to stop showing nude women is an about face from a magazine that’s never really been about face.

“The battle has been fought and won,” Playboy CEO Scott Flanders said. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passe at this juncture.”

He’s right. And thank those of you who’ve had the prim persistence to read something so porn-free this far.

Playboy is now to porn what Andy Griffith reruns are to TVLand, a reliably quaint diversion. Like Mayberry, Playboy is something you could almost show the kids if you weren’t sure it’d bore them.

It didn’t use to be that way.

To borrow an off-color expression, Playboy used to be the tits.

Where as magazines like Sports Illustrated gave male subscribers team-themed backpacks, Playboy gave us erections.

Huddling around a flashlight illuminated Playboy in some remote field was for adolescent males a true rite of passage.

The women were so beautiful. They were voluptuous. They were buck naked. Their turn-ons included honest men with curly brown hair.

I had curly brown hair!

I remember being overcome with primal horniness. Unfortunately, all the proper girls I knew sensed this and were repulsed.

In fact, necessary and life-saving release was not accomplished until I took the drastic measures that would transform my entire life.

I enrolled at Ohio University.

But prior to that hallelujah revelation my soul was weighed down but what I now understand was Playboy-induced “teasetosterone.” 

Teasetosterone is one of my favorite self-coined words. I define it as:

The surplus hormones that are released when men view so much pornography they become consumed with ambitious lust, thus making them universally repulsive to otherwise willing females.

What CEO Flanders is saying is the world is today drowning in teasetosterone.

It’s affected me in ways I never dreamed were possible back in those fields.

Yes, I’m now bored with breasts.

I noticed this when Val and I were catching up on “Orange is the New Black.” It’s a very funny show about women in prison.

These women all have breasts and alert viewers are treated to a cornucopia of HD bosom.

There are black breasts, tan breasts, pale breasts, small breasts, floppy breasts, huge breasts, trannie breasts, wrinkled and perky breasts.

We see breasts in the shower, in the gym, in the cells, in the wash room, in the yard and in the kitchen. We’ve even seen some that caused panting in the pantry.

It’s safe to say I spy more breasts in an hour of viewing OITNB than I did my entire four years in Athens.

The redundant viewing dampens my enthusiasm for something I’ve always loved.

And I’m not talking prison flicks.

I find myself getting impatient with the scenes abundant with breasts. The creators, I’m sure, say it’s essential for gritty realism, never mind that one plot line involves a prison chicken that may or may not have drugs shoved up its butt.

But if they were honest, I’ll bet they’d say they show all the breasts to titillate.

And, yes, I’m still adolescent enough I snicker anytime I get to type titillate.

I find myself getting impatient with all the breast scenes.

It’s an odd turn of events coming from a guy who spent most of 1984 with one iconic Jamie Lee Curtis “Trading Places” scene frozen on pause.

So what’s going to happen to Playboy?

I assume they’ll die a slow death. 

There’s no point in trying to be Esquire when Esquire’s perfectly capable of remaining Esquire.

As for naked women, I doubt we’re going to run out of them anytime soon.

In fact, Mylie Cyrus just announced she and the band Flaming Lips are intending to perform a naked show before a naked audience.

I’m all for barrier-smashing art, but the logistics stickler in me wonders where they’re going to put all the phones and car keys.

I don’t know who’s changed more, me or America.

But I imagine I’d build up more teasetosterone with one vintage Playboy magazine than in an auditorium full of 10,000 naked Miley Cyrus music lovers.

Related . . .

On HBO’s “Girls” being naked vs. being nekkid

Breast facts: by the book

Happy National Nude Recreation Week!

Randy Travis & the perils of Driving While Naked

Today’s space program needs nudity

A naked solution to swimsuit controversy

Naked advice on marital discord

America getting too smart for its own good

My daughter, 11 and already beginning to sense fatherly failures, asked if I’d be teaching again this year. For three of the past four years I’ve taught creative non-fiction to graduate students at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.

No, I said. I’m done teaching.

“Did you get fired?”

No, it’s impossible to fire someone who doesn’t have a job.

“Why won’t you go back?”

They’re not interested in me. They said I’m no longer qualified.

“Too bad. I know you liked doing it.”

For a split second I thought about launching into a little parental dissertation about the importance of education, but my heart wasn’t in it.

And I don’t want to risk my daughter growing up over-educated like the rest of America.

New state regulations mean I have to on paper be at least be a smidgen smarter than the people I teach and that’s no longer possible.

I was an adjunct professor -- no salary, no benefits, no commitments. It’s the professional equivalent of a one-night stand. And I’m all for that.

The first day was always my favorite. I’d deliberately rush in to the first of 16 three-hour sessions 10 minutes late. Everyone was pissed.

Then looking frantic as a meth chef on deadline, I’d pull out a single sheet of paper and begin stammering: “When . . . I . . . heard . . . I’d . . . be . . . teaching . . . a . . . three ...”

Now imagine those excruciating pauses here: “When I heard I’d be teaching a three hour class I figured the only way I could talk that long for that duration was if I put . . . really . . . really . . . really . . . long . . . pauses . . . between . . . all . . . the . . . words.”

I had them by the end. They knew it was a joke.

My teaching was not. I earned uniformly good student evaluations and have maintained warm friendships with students who still seek my advice.

I think they liked my class because I’m an omnibus of their combined career dreams. Some of them dream of writing books. Some wonder what it would be like to dabble in tabloids. Some are ambitious to land bylines in prestigious magazines like Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Cooking Light, Men’s Health and Playboy.

I’ve done all that.

I loved college, but I’m confident I’d be the same writer I am today if I’d have skipped college and the subsequent student loan burdens and had instead sought a six-month internship under a crackerjack editor.

That was a recurring theme of mine made most emphatic in what I called my little-old-lady-in-the-woods postulate.

It’s about how while we’re engaged in lofty and theoretical discussions about writing, there’s a little old lady in the woods who just woke up today and decided she’s going to be a writer.

She never went to college, studied formal sentence structure or done much of anything but live her happy little life up there in the woods.

“This is the only calling where you don’t need any education. You can’t wake up tomorrow and say, gee, I think today I want to become a doctor, an engineer or even a school crossing guard. But anyone in the world with drive, a good story and a sharp pencil can tomorrow wake up and be a great author.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

I’m friends with many successful tradesmen. They repair roofs, unclog drains and fix your furnace when it fritzes.

They don’t talk about working. They work.

I’ve been encouraged to go back to school and earn another degree so I can resume teaching. Most of the people encouraging me to do so are the people who most benefit from all these people going back to school to earn more and more degrees.

They are academics. They think any problem can be solved through additional study.

On paper, America’s never been smarter. Everyone has a B.A., an M.A., an LL.D. or a Ph.Ds in sociology, poli sci or English lit. Many of them are doing honest work in places like Target and Lowes.

We do more thinking than doing and I’m thinking that’s a problem.

Pretty soon we’ll all be some sort of titular doctor fretting over coffee to one another about how there’s no one left who knows how to fix a busted fridge.

So, no, I’ll not incur $12,000 in debt to add another title indicating I know how to write.

If someone wants to see if I know how to write, I don’t show them a resume. I show them this blog.

It would require further study, but I wonder if this over-education is the root of Global Warming.

We’re all being burned out by too many degrees.

When taverns usurp church: a bartender retires

I don’t know what this says about me as a person, but I have more soulful revelations in taverns than I ever do in church. Happened again Saturday.

That was last call for Angelo Cammarata, the man who is arguably the world’s most historic bartender.

Says who?

Says me and the Guinness Book of World Records.

Guinness declared the 95-year-old Cammarata the world’s longest serving bartender way back in 1987.

Ang poured his first beer at his father’s grocery store when he was 19. It was the stroke of midnight on April 7, 1933, the exact instant that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a thirsty America that -- hallelujah -- killjoy Prohibition was over and so were the days of Cammaratas selling groceries. His father saw the future and it was sudsy.

Ang's been pouring them ever since. There may be older bartenders, but none who’ve tended longer. He’s known no other job.

The streak came to an end Saturday. Cammarata’s in the West View neighborhood near Pittsburgh, is closing for health reasons.

Not his.

His 59-year-old son John suffered a heart attack last year and can no longer keep up with the demands. The family sold the bar.

I wrote about Ang in 1999 for National Enquirer. This man born in 1915 (he remembers seeing disabled Civil War veterans in military parades) holds a sort of world record for me, too, as my most evergreen story. Every year he kept persevering, I’d pitch him to someone else, eventually landing his story in Playboy, Men’s Health and a handful of other publications.

Ang was the final exam in 2006 when I taught a non-fiction writing class at Point Park University.

I wanted to see if the students had learned to detect a magnificent story where none appeared to exist.

Tell a group of 20-somethings that they’re final grade will be based on a two-hour full-class question-and-answer session with a 92-year-old man and three-quarters of them will look like they want to heave their holstered cell phones at your head. Most of us will make little more than polite conversation with someone that aged.

Not when a final grade’s on the line.

I sat and listened to 15-minutes of perfunctory questions about where he lived (“West View, north of Pittsburgh”) and what he did for a living (“I’m a bartender”), before one exasperated student blurted out impatiently, “Just what makes you so special?”

That’s when the place began to fill with magic.

He told us about what it’s like to be married to the same woman, Mary, for 70 years (and that sounds like a record, too), that beer once cost a nickel, that he’s sympathetic to today’s kids, and that Negro League legend and Cammarata customer Josh Gibson was a pretty cool dude.

He told us about the simple joy of making a new friend, that he considers himself living proof that second-hand smoke dangers are overrated and that he believes he’s the luckiest man in the world.

Afterwards, we all went to his bar and he poured us beers. If nothing else, at least some of those students will look up from text messaging and wonder about the life experiences of that unassuming stranger at the bus stop.

CBS news reporter, Steve Hartman was there. He’s does the Evening News slice of life pieces and that wonderful “Everybody Has A Story” segment. I’ve always admired his work and was thrilled to see he’d nosed his way to one of my favorite subjects.

I told him my favorite Camm quote came after I asked him to pinpoint the best years of his life. Camm’s response: “For me, it was the years from when I was 40 to about 75. Those were just really great years.”

I’m truly blessed to have him call me a friend.

He went out of his way to introduce me to his family and all the friendly customers who consider him part of theirs.

He made me feel like a big shot.

That this gentleman always duplicated that sort of lavish treatment with each and every customer does nothing to diminish the honor.

I didn’t go to church the next day. Not that I was hungover. Far from it.

I didn’t go because I believe those two hours in that bar equalled a lifetime’s worth of proper religious education.

I want to see Palin naked!

I keep waiting for the announcement that Playboy has offered Sarah Palin $1 million to pose nude in time for their November election issues. That’s what they do with these instant sorts of celebrities isn’t it?

Me, I’m a knee-jerk liberal whose knee jerks most liberally whenever it's near a conservative’s crotch. It’s been twitching like crazy every time I see news of the Republican National Convention.

Until selecting Palin, John McCain had done absolutely nothing to fire up the senselessly rabid far right he’ll need to have even a chance of becoming president. It’s what I predicted in spring as he, one by one, he began dispatching the feckless bunch of Republican primary contenders, namely Mitt Romney, Rudy Guiliani, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee.

Of those, only Huckabee had a chance of energizing his base while still engaging swing voters. He’s funny, thoughtful, experienced and as he likes to say, “he’s a conservative who’s not mad at anybody.”

That’s something that appeals to guys like me. It drives me crazy to see a party build an entire campaign based on hate. George W. Bush and Karl Rove were masters at it.

They hated the media. They hated liberals. They hated gays. They hated Mexicans. They hated negotiation. They hated human rights. They hated the environment. They hated anyone who thought there should be sensible restrictions on guns.

I’m basically at peace with all those things so they left me no choice but to hate ‘em right back.

But after eight years of it, I’m tired of hating. My biggest problem with Bush has been that, at a time when every American was yearning to be united, he cast anyone who thought differently from him as an American enemy, a supporter of Al-Quada. Go ahead and search, you won’t find any “Go bin Laden!” posters hanging in my office.

That’s why I thought the Obama/McCain election was going to bring about a refreshing blast of sanity. It seemed like they were going to argue about each other’s positions, experience and potential. Sure, there’d be some sharp jabs, but they seemed to respect each other as patriotically motivated men with different solutions.

Now pretty, sexy Sarah comes out and it’s all about hate again. She hates me and we’ve never even met. It’s us against them all over again, only it’s really us against us.

McCain’s risky pick endangers us all. Her fanatical enthusiasts -- the ones you saw weeping on the convention floor -- aren’t for her because of her experience or her grit. They’re for her because she’s for killing things like polar bears and preserving things like babies no matter what the circumstance. Personally, I admire her motherhood and her decisions to my core. I just don’t want her or anyone else telling my wife or daughters what they should do in that same sad situation. And with all our problems, do we really want to decide yet another election over abortion?

And that’s not me or some liberal pundit talking. That’s Pat Buchanan, Charles Krauthammer and many equally befuddled conservative commentators. Did you hear Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal opinion monger and a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter? She was caught on a live mic saying, basically, who the hell is this? Why did he pick her? It’s a mistake, or as she said over the air picking Palin was “political bullshit.”

But don’t try and tell that to the convention weepers who are already doing the cold calculations as to when she might replace a cancer-damaged senior citizen who’ll be the oldest president ever if he’s elected. It’s clear, they have no enthusiasm for McCain. For them, it’s all about Palin.

I don’t understand why so many people who so loudly claim to love one savior are always so restlessly seeking another.

Me, I’m not worried. I’m suspecting another scandal or two is about to erupt and force her off the ticket.. Reporters from the hated media -- and, man, did all their press bashing motivate that rabid bunch -- are right now scouring Alaska for scoop. My money’s on that nonpartisan crackerjack team from National Enquirer to get the goods.

And who knows? Maybe she will pose for Playboy and throw her candidacy into more turmoil.

I’ll buy one.

Part of being a peace-loving, gay-defending, gun-confiscating, pot-legalizing tree hugger is an absolute duty to support the First Amendment in all its sordid glory.

Reading Playboy means I’m just being patriotic.