What I learned from Playboy Bunnies

I have just returned from Beverly Hills, that sparkling universe where people have wheat grass martinis for breakfast, and the Mercedes is the car their teenagers drive. I am from New York City, and we don't understand L.A.  We don't get it at the most fundamental level because you can't walk it. I forget this every time I go there, however, and seduced by the sunshine and the manicured hill outside my hotel I forget that in 500 yards in any direction I will encounter a freeway--not to mention the horrified looks of the drivers as they lower their windows to ask if I've broken down and should they call my man servant.  

Returning to the hotel after a visit to Rodeo Drive--a cross between Graceland and the Truman Show--my disassociation with L.A. increased with my first encounter with an alien being I believed existed only in the fecund imagination of a geek especially gifted with Paint Brush Pro. I nearly collided with a Playboy Bunny. Or, as I soon discovered, a wanna-be bunny. I had inadvertently wandered into their warren, where about twenty-five of them were gathered for a contest that night, when one of them would be chosen to remove the inhibiting 18 inches of fabric she was wearing and have her navel stapled--in short, to become her dream, a centerfold. 

Let me not bore you, dear reader, with the physical differences between my petite black-clad body and these towering tan goddesses, toned and augmented into perfection. Each of us has a fine enough imagination. Let me settle a matter for you here, however: they exist. While no doubt air-brushed to erase human nuisances like nose hair and pores, they are indeed a life form. And a disruptive one, at that, especially for the straight male population, who paid $18 for a Bud Light at the Beverly Hilton bar to watch them adjust the best things that money could buy. 

After the initial shock wore off, I felt a kind of calm pleasure watching them as I sipped my wine. There was something comforting in seeing that they existed. They seemed less bunnies then worker bees, humming around each other, looking for a way to make a good life out of what they felt they had to give. There was a humanness to it, even in that odd scenario--like seeing actors off stage, whispering their lines to themselves, wanting nothing more than to be so good at pretending that they believed it themselves. Though experience, age and apparel choices separated us, I understood their striving to become, even if I felt their plan had some serious flaws--the least of which was the expiration date I knew was stamped on their chromosomes, and the more serious spiritual danger of placing one's worth in another's hands. 

There was no resentment, no envy, no "over-the-rainbow why-can't-I" in me. I saw the bunnies as people, and the sea of judgment separated, landing on one girl picking at her cuticle. I saw her as she was in high school a short time ago, worried about passing, about being asked to the prom. And I worried for her. Not to win the night, but to win herself, to survive the lesson I knew was coming. She lifted her head and caught me staring. I smiled and mouthed, good luck.