Long Legs and Tall Tales: A Showgirl's Wacky, Sexy Journey to the Playboy Mansion and the Radio City Rockettes (32 page)

Kali was a musical genius in her own right. With her petite, sexy, toned body and waist-length, cascading sunset of pink-red-orange hair, Kali looked the part of a rock and roll goddess and had the raspy, rough sound to match. Her voice couldn’t have been more different from mine, which had, much to my dismay, more of a sweet, innocent quality—the type of tone that gathers wide-eyed, animated bluebirds, bunnies, and deer to a Disney princess’s dainty feet. Her voice was raw with grit and gravel and fire and sex, the type that could bring a 350-pound, tattooed bruiser to his knees weeping at its sheer power and passion. In spite of this discrepancy, I loved taking lessons from her and naively held out hope that some of her incredibly cool rock vibe would rub off on me. She was a real rock star in my eyes. She even sang in a band with Michael Jackson’s former bass guitar player, Jennifer Batten. Body Guard Billy and I would go to hear her sing at various clubs around Los Angeles. She was incredible.

Kali taught me something called “Vocal Gymnastics” and spent many lessons coaching me on “riffs” and stylistic choices for the songs I chose to sing. For my first demo tape, she actually let me sing lead vocals on top of the original background tracks for the song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” This tune and others from the soundtrack for the movie
Corrina, Corrina
, starring Whoopi Goldberg, had been recorded at their studio. I sang the song over and over and over in my car, practicing all I had learned, trying to sound even remotely like Kali.   

When the day came to record, I was in heaven, wearing the headset and standing in the sound booth. I felt like a real recording artist! I struggled with the song, however, and got frustrated. We took a zillion recordings that Kali spent hours editing to splice together the best of the takes. The finished product was a quilt of bits and pieces sewn together, which felt like cheating to me. I couldn’t have sung the entire song well in one take if my life depended on it. Still, the demo turned out well. I listened to it over and over and over, marveling that I was the one singing. I never did sound like Kali, though, and I never would or even should have. My voice still attracted birds and bunnies and fawns without possessing a speck of grit or gravel or sex, but for me it was another dream come true and worth every penny.

*******

For the Japan show, there were again a few cast changes and some shifting around of parts as Rhonda, Porsche, and Kylie had moved on. With Porsche’s exit, I was dubbed dance captain. Besides me, remaining cast members were Callie, Jasmine, Satin, and Athena, leaving openings for a lead singer and two dancers. There were also a few costume changes or, more accurately, deletions. Unlike in Singapore and Indonesia where government censors kept making our show “cleaner,” the Japanese wanted our show “dirtier” and insisted that some bare breasts be included—a perfectly reasonable request, I felt, considering this was Playboy. Reasonable, that is, until I was the one requested to take one (or two) for the team. “Would you go topless, Kristi? It pays more,” Val assured me. “No way,” I responded, feeling dirty and offended that she even asked me. What kind of a girl did she think I was? (Although when hanging out on the French Riviera on my post college-graduation backpacking trip, I did contemplate going topless along with all the other European female beach bathers. It was a perfectly normal, acceptable practice for them and seemed so freeing. Alas, just as I was getting up my nerve to disrobe, a team of young male American soccer players showed up, and I got stage fright.)

I became concerned about the possibility of losing my job, but I was willing to let it go if it meant nudity. Going topless didn’t pay
that
much more than dancing “covered” anyway. So if it was going to be a life-changing event, “Don’t do it!” became my motto. It might be easy for some gals to justify the situation thinking, “It’s Japan. These will be complete strangers who don’t speak English. No one back home will even know I did it.” But they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking no one would find out. Even if they were performing for only one night in the outskirts of Siberia, their uncle’s buddy’s cousin’s neighbor might just happen to be there on a reindeer herding expedition and see them and be thrilled to share his photos with everyone he knows.

If going topless, you must make sure you are perfectly okay with not only the general public but your personal acquaintances, including parents, siblings, friends, schoolmates, teachers, neighbors, postman, bank teller, librarian, gas station attendant, and everyone else seeing your breasts on display. I was not okay with that. Would it be easier if we were all naked all the time like those tribes in Africa? If we weren’t ashamed of our bodies so we had to hide them and then create these weird sexual outlets for what we have forbidden ourselves to see under normal circumstances? I’m not sure, but it seems like a silly game we play.

Why not have the actual Playmates go topless? After all, public nudity was their forte, and their breasts were already deemed luscious enough to be endorsed by
Playboy
magazine. Why not display our most desirable, experienced, and happily flaunted, abashedly unashamed bosoms? Well, because Playboy strictly forbade it. Perhaps without photo retouching and the ability to control the environment, they were concerned their product would be diluted or deemed less sexy. Regardless, since the Playmates were out of the running and none of the rest of the current cast would drop their tops, Val hired two dancers who would: Tina and Tasha. Thankfully, Val didn’t just replace me, which she easily could have done. 

Now all we needed to do was fill the vacant singer spot. Jasmine’s younger sister, Marina, had always dreamed of performing and following in her older sister’s footsteps, so, being the loving sister that she was, Jasmine encouraged Val to hire her relatively inexperienced sibling. Val agreed. So Callie kept her original track, Jasmine took over Rhonda’s solos, and Marina mostly filled in for Porsche’s original track with one major exception: “Kali tells me you’ve been doing well in your singing lessons, Kristi, and I want you to take over the ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ solo,” Val announced. My jaw dropped. I was both terrified and thrilled. Here was my big break! “Plus, you and Marina will sing backup for Jasmine in the Aretha Franklin medley.” I was on cloud nine! Finally, I get to really sing! With a microphone!

*******

Soon we were back at the LAX International Terminal but this time without bodyguard. Valerie didn’t feel we needed one in Japan, so Billy went back to his normal job. This trip we flew Singapore Air, and I had never been so pampered in an airplane. The flight attendants were lovely Asian women in beautiful floral kimonos, white socks, and thong sandals. We received complimentary travel bags with comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, and socks. The food was divine--delicious Japanese noodles and scrumptious blueberry tarts. 

The long overseas flights were old hat by now, we had done them so many times. Our most difficult challenge was to look (and smell) glamorous when we arrived at our destination, as we were often greeted by our hosts who expected us to look the part of sexy Playboy’s Girls of Rock & Roll. This wasn’t always an easy task when you’ve been crumpled in a tiny seat for over ten hours, spilling food on yourself, sporting bedhead and drool down your chin from napping, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, mascara smudged like a raccoon, clothes wrinkled and stale. Through previous experience, I came up with a few tips for myself:

1. Don’t bother wearing makeup on a flight. It just gets smeared everywhere when you sleep. Wait to put it on just before landing. Allowing myself to fly makeup-less took getting over my own vanity and a belief that I had to look hot as a Playboy representative. But if we didn’t advertise who we were by wearing the Playboy T-shirt or jacket, no one on the plane or in the airport knew who we were or cared what we looked like anyway.

2. Carry a toiletries bag with makeup, deodorant, perfume, breath spray, toothbrush, and toothpaste so you can primp and freshen up prior to landing.

3. Bring Visine. My eyes were always bloodshot from lack of sleep, so I used Visine to get the red out.

4. Bring a nice hat. My hair was always greasy and pasted to my head by the end of the trip, and there was nothing I could do to improve that situation. Luckily, hats were in style, so I bought an assortment of dressier floppy hats with oversized flowers on the front and more casual baseball caps including a funky sequined one I’d purchased in Indonesia. I figured rock and roll chicks could get away with wearing hats. It was the best I could do under the circumstances. This business of always being sexy took a lot of effort.

*******

Oddly enough, I hadn’t been particularly excited about going to Japan. Of course, I wanted the work; I just had never thought much about the country itself. But the minute I stepped off the plane at Narita International Airport, before I’d seen a thing, I knew I was going to love the place—call it inexplicable intuition. The warm feeling continued even while we sat holed up for hours in customs trying to sort out our visa debacle (we didn’t have the proper papers that allowed us to work in the country). As we sat quarantined in the special customs problems room waiting and wondering if they were going to ship us right back home, Satin whispered to Callie, “Remember that trip to the Philippines where we all had our luggage searched at the airport?” “Oh yeah!” Callie recalled, “All the Playmates had brought their vibrators, and the customs guys were pulling them out of the suitcases and holding them up to inspect them!” “They didn’t even know what they were!” Satin exclaimed. The two of them laughed hysterically. I had never seen a real vibrator let alone made it my traveling companion. This customs cock-up was potentially more critical than a sex-toy investigation, but I had a feeling everything was going to work out. Miraculously it did, and we were eventually on our way to get settled into our housing. Tokyo, Japan’s capital and largest city, as well as the largest metropolitan area in the world, was going to serve as our home base for the summer.

Driving through Tokyo gave me the impression that this city was incredibly high tech, clean, safe, chic, streamlined, modern, and expensive. Space was a precious commodity and, as a result, the Japanese were quite space-efficient. I saw homes with driveways containing lifts you could drive your car onto; they would rise up and then you could park another car underneath. Ingenious! Given the lack of room, it was good that the people were small. Or maybe the people were small because they had little room to grow, like goldfish that stay small in a tiny fishbowl but grow large when placed in a big fish tank. Perhaps Americans are so big, relative to the Japanese, because we have had the luxury of lots of land to spread out in.

To my surprise, instead of a hotel, we were housed in a tiny two-story apartment building that was comprised of 12 units, six on top and six below. The building stood in the middle of a highly populated residential and commercial area in the Shinjuku ward, one of 23 municipalities that made up the heart of Tokyo, which also boasted what was called by some the “busiest train station in the world.” We weren’t downtown with the skyscrapers but were instead in an adjacent area chockablock with apartments and homes and little shops, strings of colorful, paper decorations suspended over the streets.

I was thrilled when we were each handed the key to our own teeny-tiny apartment. Privacy! Yay! But when I say teeny-tiny, I mean it. The one-room studio apartment included a teeny-tiny desk facing the only window, which looked out over the back of the apartment building that stood behind and nearly on top of us. A teeny-tiny TV sat atop the desk. Once in a while I would turn it on to see what was playing, but given that the shows were all in Japanese, TV didn’t hold my interest for long. I was delighted with the teeny-tiny “kitchenette”—a small sink and countertop, a complimentary electric teapot and rice cooker, and a teeny-tiny refrigerator like college kids use in their dorm rooms.

The only official storage space was a small standing wardrobe closet just tall, wide, and deep enough to hang a couple of outfits one behind the other. The box was the width of a shirt, and it offered me only three hangars. This posed an interesting challenge for me, given that I had packed like an idiot, having brought thirteen pairs of shoes and countless outfits trying to act like a celebrity. My suitcases were so heavy, the handles broke off soon after our arrival. In my defense, however, there was reason to believe that we were supposed to live up to some image in public, especially in front of our hosts. Personally, I wanted to look fab and play the role of rock star. Wasn’t that half the fun?

The downside of my overzealous packing was the impracticality of where to put all my clothes. I layered shirt after shirt and pants after pants on top of each hangar and piled the shoes into a mountain beneath the garments. At least we’d be settled here for a while, and I could make myself at home.

There was a futon loft bed that I could access by climbing up a teeny-tiny ladder. The bed was so close to the ceiling that I couldn’t sit up without bumping my head. At first I felt claustrophobic and uncomfortable suspended in the air and being wedged between the bed and ceiling, but eventually I adjusted. 

The apartment also included a teeny-tiny bathroom cubicle with a toilet, teeny-tiny sink, and teeny-tiny square “tub” that was just big enough to squeeze into in a sitting position so I could spray myself with a shower head. From the shower I could reach any of the bathroom’s four walls. It was teeny-tiny, but it was all mine!

Wanting to stay in shape, I brought along a portable cassette tape player and a cassette tape of an aerobics workout I could do in the apartment. The room was so small, however, that I had to get very creative to successfully do the moves and poses, maneuvering my arms and legs above, below, around, and even through the desk, chair, and ladder. Living in a small fishbowl was an adjustment, but there was something comforting and serene about the simplicity of having so little and yet having all the basic necessities.