The Time I Did A Photo Shoot With A Bunch of Bikini Models

There are a handful of stories from my college days that I look back upon and have to file under the heading "How In The World Did That Happen?" There's the time I found myself judging a beauty pageant, or the time I had ice cream at the Double T Diner with Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise, and the time I ended up at a veterinarian's office at 2:30 in the morning with a grieving family and their dead dog (but that story I'm saving for a screenplay). And then there's the time I did a photo shoot with a gaggle of bikini clad girls.

In the mid-90's I did a wacky Morning Zoo-style radio show on our college radio station. A good friend of mine, who we also considered the station's promotions manager, ended up getting us a promotional deal with a surf shop in Towson. It was something along the lines that if people went into the surf shop and mentioned the "Wacky Wake Up Show with Mr. Ed" they'd get some discount on some brand of suntan lotion...or something like that. They also gave the station prizes to give away on the air. We got the surf shop to give us free swimsuits for a few girls to wear to make a poster or two announcing our big deal! We all ready knew which girls on campus we wanted to recruit for our poster. A few of them had modeling experience, one of them was even Miss Teen USA (or something like that) and yes, some of them had work experience at Hooters on their resume. We had no trouble at all getting a photographer on board. A semi-professional photographer who took pictures for the school paper was happy to help out, and even supplied all the equipment and film.

Needless to say, it was a fun afternoon. I don't have any of the original photographs - as the photographer turned out to be a little too protective of the finished project. I did manage, at the time, to photocopy about a million copies of some of the pictures...

We shot these photos at the sports complex of our college. The second photo above was actually taken against the maintenance shed.

I don't know what's going on in that top picture, although you don't see me complaining. I always thought it was kind of funny that we used the sand trap at the golfing range to double as a beach in that picture. I'm sure you could tell we were on sand if I had the actual photograph.

Good times! I don't remember much else about the promotion except months later the surf shop tried to tell us that we owed them $300 bucks for the swimsuits!? They went out of business before we could resolve that dispute. But these blue tinted photocopies will live on forever!