If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring

Outtake from This is Now in Chicago

I’ve told this story more than a few times, but here we go again. In the 1970s, I’m a 10-year-old living in Houston. One weekend, my parents are part of a group garage sale, and as a nosey kid, I’m poking around when I spot a large stack of Playboy magazines. I didn’t even know what Playboy was, but my mother clocked my interest and said, “You can have them all if you want, with one proviso: Don’t laugh at the pictures. Laughing at the human body, whatever shape or size, is for pea brains. Can you promise?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I blurted.

“Good. Don’t be a pea brain, Trace.”

One of the luckiest technicalities of my existence is that I grew up with parents and grandparents who, despite being politically conservative southerners, were neither racist, sexist, nor classist. They weren’t worried about what other people thought and never insisted upon anything beyond me being a freethinking and fair-minded human animal.

Not laughing at people’s bodies—except for the one time I was on mushrooms in a truck stop with Carey Boudiette—has remained hardwired into my personality, and it’s a lesson that has served me well in life. Yet, I did misstep by taking one of the Playboys to school for a proposed “Show & Tell” about Hugh Hefner, which resulted in my father being called. Oops. ;)

To emphasize the obvious, Playboy turned me on to a lot. The pictures always held sway, but in time, the ideas and art balanced out the appeal, and once I learned of the sign on the door of the Playboy Mansion that read, “If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring,” I immediately became a locked-and-loaded devotee of hedonism, swinging culture, and sexual liberation. It was inspiring to a middle-class kid from Texas, and the fantasy of time-traveling back to the Playboy Mansion to hobnob with the journalists, celebrities, Bunnies, and Playmates frequenting 1340 North State in those freewheeling days owes everything to that brief encounter at a long-ago garage sale and my mom’s off-the-cuff directive: 'Don’t be a pea brain!