Mark Fidrych and Marilyn Chambers, taken from us in the same 24 hours. This truly is a cruel world. We can imagine them walking hand in hand into heaven, Mark talking softly to his ball, Marilyn talking softly to his balls ...
We think of both these folks as museum-quality examples of models no longer produced. Fidrych was the loveable sports oddball. The stuff he did -- talking to the ball, grooming the mound, all the other stuff that made everybody (including us) drop everything to watch him on "Monday Night Baseball" in 1976 -- seemed to come from the heart. We read plenty of interviews -- he was just an odd dude. If somebody was doing the same stuff today, it would obviously be a schtick, something dreamed up by an agent or a marketer to improve a guy's marketability. And when fate booted him out of the spotlight almost as soon as he had wandered into it, he seemed to take it in stride. He enjoyed the ride, but he didn't seem bitter that it had ended so quickly. He just wanted to drive his dump truck.
Marilyn Chambers was the girl too pretty for porn, and while there may have been a few girls that fell into that category afterward, it's not something that applies today. Porn was so far beyond the pale in the early 197os that not many people were willing to have sex on camera and suffer the social consequences, and a truly pretty girl was rarer than a bikini wax. These days, it's not the best path to Hollywood stardom and it won't do your beauty contest or political career much good, but it's not your ticket to Outer Castoutia either. Lots and lots of people make lots and lots of dirty movies (some pretty much for fun, others for hire), and the participants can fall just about anywhere on the beauty scale. Cherry-pick some porn stars (leaving out plastic surgery nightmare Jenna Jameson) and mix them up with fashion models, then have somebody try to tell the difference. The '70s are long gone.
It did make us wonder, though -- do they still make Ivory Snow? We have to get to the supermarket more often.
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