Bunny Birthday - Part 9 of 9

Reviewing the troops: Hef checks out new Bunny-costume developments at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. The most beautiful army in the world. And all conquering !!

Jeri Ness, a Chicago Bunny since March 1979, agrees: "I'm surprised how infatuated people still are with the Bunny image. When you go on a promotion in Bunny costume, they treat you like a little movie star."

A few women, of course, turn up feminist noses at Jeri, posing questions in the "Why are you letting them do this to you?" vein.

"I tell them I have two degrees, a bachelor's and a master's, in English lit, and I don't have to work as a Bunny, but I want to. It's a fantasy; it's fun; I meet exciting people and I make money. Ten years from now, I'll use my degrees.

"Some things never change," Jeri observes. "Men are always going to want to look at pretty girls and women are going to want to look at them, too. It's every woman's fantasy to try on the Bunny suit."

It's a chance few women are likely to get. The Bunny Costume was the first ever to be registered as a service mark with the U.S. Patent Office, and its construction details are a carefully guarded secret. Old Bunny Costumes aren't retired, they're shredded. Imitations crop up everywhere, at masquerade balls, Halloween parties and amateur theatricals. Gerald Fisher, proprietor of a thriving costume shop in rural St. Charles, Illinois, says unhesitatingly that a simulated Bunny getup is his all-time top seller.

Which may explain, in part, why 3000 young women lined up to apply for 250 positions at our Atlantic City property.

After 20 years, obviously, the Bunnies exert much of the same fascination they always have. Alert lensmen at Epsom Downs turned away from courtiers and other notables at 1978's Derby Day to snap a surprised Queen Elizabeth accepting a daisy from London Bunny Louise Palmer; early this year, other photogs rushed to photograph Bunny Louise greeting Prince Philip at a Sportsmen's Club charity event with the comment, "I'm sorry I startled your wife the last time I met her." Both photos ran all over the world, an unlikely circumstance if Miss Palmer had been anything but a Bunny. In a Bunny's life that's not unusual. Times change; Bunnies endure.

TheEnd

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