Bikini calendar scandal the stuff of someone's fantasy

By ERIC BAERREN

Well, call it the controversy that never was.

It appeared that the Girls of Central Michigan: 2007 calendar, the product of friends who met in high school, might make it into the marketplace without sparking a firestorm. But, alas, it was not meant to be Ö thanks mostly to overactive imaginations working at various media outlets.

We'll let the specific parties off the hook. No media outlet has yet existed that didn't at one time or another manage to throw a little gasoline on the fire. This time was no different.

From all accounts (well, this comes via Sun reporter Ian Gray, who once tried to submit a pizza box top covered in crayon-scrawled binary code as a story on a kindergarten mentoring program), everyone - everyone - was caught off guard when reports made it seem like true scandal had broken out.

The truth, of course, is a little different. Not only did no scandal break out, but the university would have been in an odd situation if it had. The four friends who own Shamrock Media Productions are CMU students who put to use skills they paid the university to teach them. They hired all CMU students to produce the calendar, including giving a student photographer and a student graphic artist opportunities to build their portfolios for post-graduation employment. It's the kind of thing, one of the four told us Tuesday afternoon, that the business school encourages them to do.

But, alas, there were scantily-clad women afoot. And, that almost guaranteed to get someone's knickers bunched up.

It almost didn't happen. Aside from a few anonymous harumphs locally, the controversy begins and ends with the reports themselves. After the smoke cleared, the stuffed shirts in Warriner Hall grumping about scandalous co-eds turned out to be constructed of nothing but straw. It might not have been true yellow journalism, but it was certainly tinted.

The reports were full of loaded words and phrases like "racy," "sexually charged" and "string bikini."

I suppose those words just might fit if your definition of a string bikini is something other than a full-length, striped cotton suit and waxed handlebar moustache. You almost wonder if the person who'd written the story had actually looked at the calendar, since Ms. November and Ms. December wore skirts.

As for whether the calendar is sexually charged, I'll admit to a moral compass that was knocked a bit off kilter during my Navy days. After a night of frisking young sailors and Marines coming off liberty in foreign ports, the contraband pile was filled with magazines and photos bad enough to make a sailor blush Ö literally. By those standards, a dozen girls in bathing suits and skirts in a pretty faces-in-pretty places calendar is mighty tame stuff. Besides, it was only a decade and a half ago that Playboy came to campus and convinced a couple of students to pose in the buff (oh, the stink that was raised!).

The only people who might objectively see this as evidence of declining morals are the pros, the folks who fold their arms over their chests and grump about all that crazy jitterbugging the kids are doing these days while waxing nostalgic for an America that probably never existed. If they think the calendar was bad, they ought to take a stroll through downtown Mt. Pleasant on a warm Thursday night. The clothing covers more skin, yet manages to leave less to the imagination.

My first instinct, in fact, told me that the calendar's publishers had themselves ginned up the controversy, knowing that anything with the label "sexually charged" - even a ham sandwich - would fly off the shelves. The publishers advertised that a chunk of proceeds would go to helping the victims of Katrina, which appeared to be a ploy cut from the same cloth as the ball fields Nestle offered to build Evart in exchange for not beefing too loudly about the company's plan to sell water owned by the public back to the public.

After meeting them, I'm not so sure. They seemed genuinely surprised - perhaps I'm getting too cynical for my own good. But, if their idea was to drive sales through controversy, they executed their shrewd strategy well.

The "firestorm" prompted interviews. A couple of morning disc jockeys - the kind of people whose mere presence lowers good taste and decency 10 notches (if your humor relies heavily on the words "midget" and "sex," Joe and the Poor Boy are your kind of guys) - offered to help them pick models for next year's calendar. Orders poured in. And, they got to shrug their shoulders and say, "We don't understand. It's only a swimsuit calendar."

Maybe we can believe that once, since I guess it doesn't make much difference. If it happened by chance, they've stumbled into the secret formula for building buzz. If it all happened by design, they'll probably be signing my paychecks before too long.

Eric Baerren is the Sun news editor. His columns appear Fridays.

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