Forgot that I’m going to run out of time and need to squeeze in some quadruple plays for the playmates lest we miss a Miss November. This one is super-special, so enjoy!
When the lovely and talented Monica Tidwell was born, the second issue of Playboy was fresh on the newsstands. This means that when she posed for the magazine in 1973 at age 19, she was the very first playmate to be younger than the magazine itself.
Photographed by Dwight Hooker and Bill Frantz.
This is a great spread. The photographers captured something very vulnerable and real in Ms. Tidwell (for my money the most beautiful Miss November yet), a sensitivity and gentle eroticism that lacks in many of the other shoots we’ve seen this month.
This is further carried through by the ambient lighting, the natural styling of her hair, and the focus on handmade, organically fashioned articles and materials like wood frames and wool blankets.
The whole shoot just has this really airy, sunlit, authentic, natural feel to it. It’s special.
Though she was discovered in Chicago (seems like they really had an active scouting scene there, doesn’t it? maybe because that’s where Hef is from? I guess one of these days I should look up the actual history of the magazine, huh), Ms. Tidwell was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and grew up in Georgia.
Like almost every other Southerner I have met or heard of, she had literary leanings when questioned about her ambitions. I don’t know what it is about the South that makes every person from there drip with this deeply poetic appreciation of nature and a playful love of language, but it seems to be a Thing.
I have met and loved so many great friendohs from the South, and they all have a beautiful, expressive outlook on life. (Dik and the LBC, I am looking at you two poetic ginger geniuses in particular!)
“One of my great ambitions in life is to write a novel as good as [Wolfe's] Look Homeward, Angel. My second great ambition is to make a movie with Ken Russell and Oliver Reed.” (“Ubiquitous Miss,” Playboy, November 1973)
According to the wiki, that dream of making a movie with Ken Russell (visionary director of The Who’s Tommy) is half coming true.Tidwell is currently the primary producer of the off-Broadway play Mind Game in New York City. Ken Russell will direct the play and Keith Carradine will star.
Hands down my favorite picture from this pictorial.
Good on her! An ethereal, Autumnal little beauty (I told you redheaded Miss Novembers are I’m pretty sure a Thing), she reminds me of Sissy Spacek or Bridget Fonda and Jodie Foster. All peaches and cream and spattery freckles with strawberry blonde hair, but then there is something rabbity and tough about them, like biting on tinfoil, something driven and hardscrabble, determined when it comes to their quiet goals. Sorry to project emotive qualities and wax poetic. I just love country girls.
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