I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time. When my daughter was little, she used to ask me to tell her a story from my life, and I recall having difficulty remembering anything specific from my childhood & teen years. It’s all just a blur of Brady Bunch, bad haircuts and cheerleading.

If I’m going to start writing anything now, I may as well begin with whatever unusual stories I can somewhat recall… which brings me to the Playboy episode.

In late 1990, Playboy magazine booked a suite at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston to scout for the April 1991 issue titled, “Women of the Women’s Colleges”. At the time, I was working at Boston Magazine nearby and we’d all heard that protesters had gathered in front of the hotel. The protesters were angry that women who had attended a women’s college would consider posing in Playboy. They felt that any one woman’s individual choice to pose would be seen as representative of the collective of all women who had ever attended a women’s college. I attended a women’s college and I disagreed. So instead of spending my lunch hour eating, I found myself sitting in a suite at the Westin surrounded by prospective Playboy models, the Playboy staff and a handful of producers from ABC-TV’s Boston affiliate.

I never had aspirations to pose in Playboy nor did I think Playboy would extend the invitation. I just felt like exercising my right to cross through the protest line. When I sat down with the Playboy team, they asked all of the expected questions as they tried to get to know me. When I mentioned that I had a different perspective than the women protesting, one of the tv producers zeroed in and asked me to appear the following morning on the Good Day show which aired in Boston every weekday. She explained that I’d be on-air in a split screen with a crowd at a women’s college campus and they’d be yelling at me via remote feed. That’s not exactly how she sold it, but I knew that’s how it would go.

Early the next morning, I showed up at the t.v. studio and was seated next to a young woman who had already posed for the magazine. Sitting across from us was Eileen Prose, the doyenne of Boston morning television. Our host was not very good at putting on an impartial face which became obvious when she gave me a bewildered look and asked “Are you posing because of the money?”. I clarified that Playboy had not even asked me to be in the issue, and then I spent the rest of the hour fighting for air time to respond to some of the mass generalizations coming from the crowd. I didn’t successfully deliver every point I wanted to make, but for being in the hot seat on live t.v., I did ok.

In the end, it was a memorable experience. A nice bonus occurred about a week after the appearance when I was approached while waiting for my lunch order at Copley Place. It was a young woman who had been part of the group that was debating with me on t.v. Surprisingly, she told me that whatever I had said changed her opinion. Even more surprisingly, Playboy called and asked me to be in the issue and to fly to Chicago to be a guest on the syndicated Phil Donahue the following week. I declined both. I was pretty sure that the Donahue segment would be a nationally-televised badgering. I watched the episode when it aired and that’s pretty much what it was. I didn’t care about being in the magazine either. Being featured in a future back issue of Playboy is as permanent as posting photos on social media today. It would have been a unique souvenir to have when I’m 80 years old though. I did hold onto a few other minor keepsakes: a VHS tape recording of the Good Day show (transferred to the Cloud before it disintegrated) and the Playboy photographer’s business card. I think I also still have a blank copy of that Playboy questionnaire form which gets printed in the magazine where the featured models answer questions about their favorite things .

Recently, my 19 year old daughter asked to see the Good Day interview. It was very weird rewatching and listening to my 26-year-old self, with my huge head of hair and massive shoulder pads, while sitting next to my grown daughter. She saw past the salacious Playboy part of it and was proud of me for defending myself against a surprising number of fairly judgmental voices . Pretty ironic, considering that the place where I learned how to articulate my point of view and present it respectfully was at Mount Holyoke, the women’s college from which I graduated.