Great Moments in American History

Horatio writes: Our grandparents had V-Day. Our parents had JFK's Assassination. Everyone can tell you where they were on these days on which history turned. After which nothing was the same again. For our generation, the dateline was September, 1985. When Playboy published a series of black and white candids of Madonna, unlike a Virgin, laying around oh so casually in the nude. More older brothers than ever before were press-ganged into purchasing this magazine in the quintessential historic moment when candy pop music culture collided with fiendish-teen-hormones-a- buzzing-in-ways-you don't-quite- understand. But what did we really learn from this historic hour? If Tom Brokaw were writing a book about it, what would he uncover? We , for one, remember being far more confused as opposed to aroused by these photos with their copious amounts of under arm hair. Exactly how many vaginas did a woman have? And how were we exactly meant to make them all work at once? Send us your tales now.

A Little Something For Superbowl Weekend, Sir? The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders

Horatio writes: We are off to Arizona to witness the Giants stooping to conquer. And so we are serving you up a little something special before we go. From Jezz in New York City: Growing up in Westchester, my family were die-hard giants fans. But my life changed alongside untold thousands of my generation during Super Bowl X when a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader winked at a network cameraman. He relayed the image to 75 million viewers, who helped turn the Texas phenomenon into a national craze. I became a devoted Cowboys fan on the spot.

Fast forward to 1978, Playboy tried and failed to run an official Cowboys cheerleader pictorial. Plan B was to run a spoof using a fictional ensemble called the "Texas Cowgirls." I was eight at the time and an only child so Mark, the fourteen year-old son of our family friends, the Jonases was like an older brother to me. When he turned me onto everything good in life. From trains to toy aircraft modeling. Imagine my surprise when he took me into his room during one routine visit, and after shutting the door, dove dramatically under his mattress and emerged with a copy of Playboy. I had never seen a porno mag before. And here was this one, stuffed full of Cheerleader rumpy pumpy. I popped a boner on the spot. But I was five or six years away -- an adolescent eternity really -- from being able to know what to do with it. I was left to stumble back into the lounge to sit silently numb with my parents and the Jonases, like a horny little caterpillar contemplating what it would feel like to become a beautiful butterfly some time in the distant future.

I experienced the same emotion every week for the next couple of years whenever the camera would caress the cheerleaders limbs to the background droning of Cosell and Meredith, and my mind would drift to the notion of doing something -- though the idea of exactly what was stiil unformed -- to these luscious, ripe, pert images. This year's Superbowl looks like a snooze. Devoted fans of this website may enjoy using this at half-time.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wanker

When I was little my dad, a lawyer, won a decent case and we moved into a fancy house. Not crazy fancy, but cozy enough that the fellow who lived there before us built a secret closet in the master bedroom to stash his stuff. To the unaided eye, this closet was nothing more than a built-in bookshelf. But to the hundreds of kids my brothers and I shepherded inside over the years, it was a club house fit for a teenage James Bond. One pull on the middle shelf and the bookshelf swung open, revealing a cramped, closed-off space that was once a hidden passageway to a bedroom on the other side of the house.

The musty closet was used mainly for storage and contained such items as pleather suitcases, toasters, alarm clocks and anything else the local bank used to entice customers to open a savings account. It also, as my friends and I were delighted to discover one summer afternoon, housed a quite exhaustive collection of 1980's Playboys. If the three trees on our front lawn that formed a natural baseball diamond hadn't already made me the most popular kid in the neighborhood, these titty-filled treasures put me over the top.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In this case our demise was literally brought upon by our own hand. Evidently, the almost daily pile of soggy tissues in the trash can outside the bookshelf was a case even my scatterbrained mother could solve. Under the cover of night, the magazines suddenly disappeared, and so did my reign as most popular kid in 8th grade.