Monday, May 16, 2011

Playboy Model Gets Poly-bagged

Playboy Model Gets Poly-bagged

This story is pretty... strange, to say the least. I mean, you've come to expect that your playboy magazine subscription comes to your door step in that silly black poly-bagged plastic wrapping to hide the fact that you're getting a magazine that Maxim seems to make moot.

But it's another thing to find out that a one time centerfold model ended up becoming a sort of mummy.
Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said.

Vickers, 82, had not been seen for a long time. A neighbor discovered her body in an upstairs room of her Westwanda Drive home on April 27. Its mummified state suggests she could have been dead for close to a year, police said.

The official cause of death will by determined by the Los Angeles county coroner's office, but police said they saw no sign of foul play.

Vickers had lived in the 1920s-era stone and wood home for decades, and it served as the background for some of her famous modeling pictures. But over time it had become dilapidated, exposed in some places to the elements.

Susan Savage, an actress, went to check on Vickers after noticing old letters and cobwebs in her elderly neighbor's mailbox.

"The letters seemed untouched and were starting to yellow," Savage said. "I just had a bad feeling."
After pushing open a barricaded front gate and scaling a hillside, Savage peered through a broken window with another piece of glass taped over the hole. She decided to enter the house after seeing a shock of blond hair, which turned out to be a wig.

The inside of the home was in disrepair and it was hard to move through the rooms because boxes containing what appeared to be clothes, junk mail and letters formed barriers, Savage said. Eventually, she made her way upstairs and found a room with a small space heater still on.

She was looking at a cordless phone that appeared to have been knocked off its cradle when she first saw the body on the floor, she said. Savage had known Vickers but the remains were unrecognizable, she said.

She remembered her neighbor as an elegant women in a broad straw hat, dressed in white, with flowing blond hair and "a warm smile."

"She kept to herself, had friends and seemed like a very independent spirit," Savage said. "To the end she still got cards and letter from all over the world requesting photos and still wanting to be her friend."

Savage said the neighbors felt terrible.

"We've all been crying about this," she said. "Nobody should be left alone like that."
Woah. So she was there for almost a year. I think you would expect my colored commentary right about now but my humor has dried out at the moment. Which is pretty much the strangest part of this story. She had a space heater running for at least a year and it didn't break? Talk about good quality goods. Must not have been made in America.

I guess you can look forward to her centerfold in the next edition of National Geographic. This is pretty awesome though when you think about it. How many of us can really say that we are going to awe people with your own death someday.

Farewell Yvette. I had no idea who you were as a person, nor as an object of sexual desire and objectification. Which I guess was good for you in your youth and I probably should check out "Attack of the 50 foot woman" some time. Sucks that your corpse turned into a mummy, but then again you were already dead. So it's not like you care what happened to your body.

I bet this has to be the worst fears for many. Hell, the sole reason for people getting married is to not die alone and be completely forgotten with no loved ones around to notice. Kind of shows you where you are in terms of your social meter. That you could be gone off this planet for a year and no one will ask "hey, what happened to so and so"

I'm actually really surprised that she didn't have some small dogs around. Being a mummy is one thing but having it be a half eaten mummy due to those hungry little bastards would have been the icing to this strange news piece.

In hindsight it wasn't a great idea to pre-pay all your utilities and have stuff set up on automatic withdraws. If my cable bill is even a couple of weeks late I get really threatening letters in the mail telling me they'll turn off my shit.

They probably should have just left her there though. Future archaeologist aren't going to have anything cool to find if we keep taking the bodies out and putting them in the ground. Just think how fucked up it would be if we didn't have the Egyptian Pharaoh's with their blinged out tombs?

We keep taking away these mummified body found in front of a blaring TV... and what do they have to look forward to?

Maybe they'll still be able to come across a copy of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and mistake it for a documentary on the tragedy of improbable mutations during the early atomic age. Oh, who am I kidding, they'll all be dead as we would have destroyed the planet already.

But then you realize that a year isn't really that much time at all, especially considering other instances like this happening...
Back in 1966, a Zagreb, Croatia woman named Hedviga Golik made herself a cup of tea, sat down in front of her television set and prepared to watch a program she wanted to see. She never finished either the drink or the show.

Golik sadly passed away while she was relaxing by the tube that day. She was only 42 years of age.

The story isn't terribly unusual but what happened after that event is.

Friends and neighbours began to wonder whatever became of the woman who lived next door, but no one ever went over to investigate. Most assumed she'd simply moved out of the capital and carried on with her life.

Which is what makes this week's discovery both bizarre and tragic. After 42 long years, someone finally entered Golik's long closed-up apartment and found her remains still sitting in the same armchair where she'd sat to watch that show so many decades ago.

Now authorities are trying to figure out why no one caught on, why no relative ever came to call and how it's possible a residence could stay unattended for that length of time without somebody becoming suspicious.

Golik was reported missing way back when, but for some reason, no one ever checked her home. When cops finally went to investigate who owned the mysterious tiny apartment, they discovered Golik had never left it.

Cops are baffled by the stunning find and are planning to investigate how the poor woman's fate was left hanging for such a long time.
That's some shit right there.

So this all puts things in perspective for people. Perhaps you should work on hanging out in social circles enough that they will miss you if you suddenly happen not to show your face in the crowd for a year. Especially if you were a playboy playmate.

Just think how fucked up that is. At one point you were the center of attention. Now you are once again because of your body being talked about. Objectification comes full circle.

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