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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Pinky revisits her lost youth!

                       Pinky (2nd from left) with the bevy of beauties.

I received an out-of-the-blue phone call last week. It was a young girl called Rachel, the local 2013 Surf Girl entrant who’d exhumed my mobile number from my parents and was contacting all the previous Surf Girls. 
Apparently, it’s the club’s fiftieth anniversary this year.

If you’ve read Pinky and the Surf Life Savers , you will recall back in 1981, Pinky gave the Surf Girl Quest a bit of a whirl and managed to add inadvertent, naked flashing into her dingy resume.

“I’m trying to get as many ‘girls’ as I can down to the beach for a group photo. Are you free to meet up at the clubhouse about 5:00pm this afternoon?” asked the vivacious Rachel.

Mmmm… I thought. It might give me something interesting to write about on my blog, I thought self-servingly.

After I hung up the phone my mind was besieged with paranoid insecurity. Let’s see… If I was a surf girl thirty-two years ago that means there were about seventeen girls who came before me.

Surely I won’t be the oldest… unless the others have all passed away from old age or are in resting homes of course.

I wonder if they’ve all turned to fat? Geez…I hope so, I mused optimistically.

I raced home after work; showered, inspected myself in the mirror from ninety-seven angles, had a bit of a cry, dragged on a pair of tight black jeans and a t-shirt to appear as if I just didn’t give a toss and then meticulously trowelled on enough makeup to sink a Magnetic Island ferry.

I was the first to arrive.

As the lovely ladies trickled in, I came to the slow and tragic realisation that I was, indeed, the oldest chicky-babe in the group.

Not only were they all considerably younger, but the gals were all sans make-up, au naturale, sun kissed and athletic-looking.

Pinky looked like the Joan Collins of the surfing fraternity.



To make matters worse, the press turned up and the first thing the junior reporter asked was, “So who is the earliest entrant here.”

“You mean the oldest,” I mumbled raising my bat-winged arm in disenchantment.

“What was it like way back then?” the twelve year old Lois Lane persisted.

“Oh, we rode in on the back of pterodactyls and wore neck to knee bathing costumes.” I replied.

No, I didn’t say that but I should have.

Rachel had asked all of us to bring in any old memorabilia and photographs we had of our glamorous year.

Many of you young folk won’t believe this... but back in 1981 videos had not even been introduced into Australia yet.

“What’s a video?” I hear you ask.

It was a black rectangular prism we used to use instead of DVDs. People literally fed them into a thing called a VCR which would chew them up into mangled plastic globules.

The only photos I had were faded 5 X 7s my beloved father took of the TELEVISION SCREEN during the judging broadcast!

BUT… I did keep this beauty!

                              Scotto, modelling my sash!