Spontaneity and the Playboy Club

I’m set in my ways. If it’s morning I’m on the computer, in the afternoon I’m out and about. If it’s evening I’m either being self-indulgent, catching up on paperwork, giving Levi my Might Schnauzer his face-to-face time or other stuff too boring to write about. Enter the computer search for how to be more spontaneous.

One of the suggestions I found in an article on learning how to be spontaneous said you need to take ‘no’ out of your vocabulary. Isn’t that just fine and dandy! I haven’t said ‘no’ to someone asking me to a social event, party or outing since the turn of the century. Thankfully, no one has asked me to help them rob a bank on the way home from the senior hall, but the same article also says to always act in your own best interest, so at least I’d have an out should I not want to spend the rest of my life in a prison cell with someone who wants to make me her bitch. The example they used in the article was if someone asks you to get drunk, don’t say ‘yes.’ I haven’t been drunk since the 1970s and don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. 

I wasn’t always ‘spontaneity challenged’ and sometimes I wonder how I could have ever been as footloose and fancy free as I was the year I met my husband. It was in 1970 and that summer, for example, we were standing in a long line to see the blockbuster movie, Catch-22, with another couple when one of the guys said, “If we left right now, we could make last call at the Playboy Club in Chicago.” The Windy City is 185 miles away and under ideal conditions it takes the better part of three hours to drive but five minutes later we were all racing to our respective houses to pack an overnight bag and within an hour we were on the road that skirts along the bottom of Lake Michigan. We made it just in time to see the 11:00 Bunny Piano Dance. The guys had so much fun they each bought a Playboy Membership that, back in those days, included an actual key you had to show to get in.

One of my fellow cohorts that night recently posted a photo of the four of us at the Playboy Club on her Facebook page, saying that she still can’t drink a Pina Colada without it taking her right back to that time and place. Like me, she still has their souvenir mugs from that night in Chicago. And it’s a wonder we didn’t bring home cockroaches too. After leaving the Playboy Club we couldn’t find a hotel to stay overnight without it costing a month’s pay and someone suggested we try the YMCA. They had an “adjoining suite” on the 19^th floor with a lovely view of a brick wall and for a whopping $20.00 we took it. The door between the two rooms was made out of thin plywood and locked with screen door-type hook and eye and you had to walk through one room to get to the bathroom. By morning the toilet quit flushing and we found a dead cockroach in the sink. While we were sleeping it apparently got stressed out trying to crawl up the porcelain. In the morning we needed to catch a taxi to the parking garage where we’d left Don’s pride and joy, a yellow 1968 Chevy convertible but our friend was embarrassed to be picked up while standing in front of the YMCA so we went around the corner and walked down a block before hailing a cab---like the cab driver was going tip off our local newspaper. 

When my friend (who lives in Georgia now) posted the photo on Facebook and we wrote back and forth about that night, one of her other friends chimed in that she couldn’t believe that the feminist she knew had been to the Playboy Club and neither can I believe it about myself. Nor can I believe that Don talked me in to going a second time. It was to the closing of the very last Playboy Club in America in 1988. We took the motor home because Don wanted to take the dog with us. He was crazy about Jason, called our motor home The Rolling Dog House because he rarely wanted to leave Jason home alone even for an afternoon. And can you believe it, he talked one of the bunnies into letting him bring the dog inside to pose with her for a photograph. Don had that photo blown up to poster size and I was shocked last summer when someone actually paid decent money for it when I put it in a local auction. I still have Don’s membership key. I’m not ready to part with that yet and maybe that’s because it represents an era in my life when being spontaneous was the rule rather than the exception in our lives. These days, the most spontaneous thing I do is put my right sock on first instead of my left. ©

PHOTO NOTE: That's Don and me on the right. Even after seeing the photo, I still can't remember that silly beard he had going on. I remember every detail of the outfit I was wearing, though---red, white and blue with gold chains and a pleated skirt. I called it my Sgt. Peppers outfit. The Beatles influenced a lot of my clothing choices back in those days.