It's always refreshing to meet a woman who isn't a slave to fashion. After all, the things that make a woman attractive over the long run are those invisible qualities that come from the heart. So permit us to introduce Vicki Lasseter, a proud nonconformist from deep in the heart of Texas. Haltom Ci
...ty, to be precise (population 28,000), just five miles northeast of Fort Worth and 50 miles from Dallas. Vicki never liked disco and she's less than enthusiastic about the trendy Western look. "I never owned a pair of cowboy boots or a cowboy hat," she says, "until Contributing Photographer Arny Freytag gave me some to wear for the pictorial. I guess I look nice in them, but I probably won't wear them a lot. I can't speak for all Texans, but the ones I know think the cowboy 'look' - particularly when it consists of rhinestone suits and $1000 belt buckles - is silly. Real cowboys are hard, rough, dirty guys who work in their outfits, and they don't wear rhinestones." One of Vicki's older brothers tried rodeo bull riding for a while, but Vicki isn't much of a rodeo fan. ("I hate the thought of seeing people get injured.") She doesn't much cotton to country-and-western music, either. "It's so laid back, it almost puts me to sleep. I listen to it on the radio when I'm in traffic jams, because it tranquilizes me, but ordinarily I'm into rock 'n' roll." Most of her boyfriends, as it happens, have been rock musicians, and she confesses to having a penchant for bass guitarists. Vicki has lived in Haltom City all her 21 years (her birthday's this month). She attended Haltom High School and for the past two years has been a full-time student at the local Tarrant County Junior College. A solid B student, she plans to continue her education at the University of Texas in Austin as a psychology major. Her interest in psychology began after her father died when she was 17. "Before that, I was pretty wild. I hung around with some really rotten kids, a real bad crowd," she says, "but when Dad died, it jolted me out of the kind of life I was headed into. I suddenly wanted to learn more about emotions, partly because I wanted to understand myself. I'm a very emotional person.
"You see, I was a very rebellious kid. I dropped out of high school when I was 15 and married when I was 16. Those were two mistakes. Then my father died. I got divorced, cleaned up my act and went back to school. I haven't looked back since then."
Once enrolled in college, Vicki thought it might be interesting to enter a wet T-shirt contest at her favorite rock club in Fort Worth. She won the $100 first prize hands down, which inspired her to try her luck in a variety of similar local contests. "There are six or seven clubs in the Fort Worth-Dallas area that have contests two or three nights a week: wet T-shirt, better bottoms, naughty wet nightie and so on; I've entered all of them over the past couple of years and on some nights I've won in two clubs. The money came in handy, as you can imagine."
Our favorite story is the one she tells of the night she'd just won a naughty-wet-nightie contest in Fort Worth and was speeding to another contest in Dallas when she was stopped by a policeman. "This guy pulls me over, comes up to the window and just stares. I was wearing a soaking-wet nightgown, which, of course, was easy to see through, and I wasn't wearing any underwear. I thought to myself: This is it. If he doesn't take me to jail, he'll take me to a nut house. But the cop had worked crowd control in those clubs before, and he understood when I told him that I was speeding in a wet nightgown because I had to hurry to enter a better-bottoms contest in Dallas. He let me go." We're not surprised. On a slow night, what cop wouldn't be grateful for a conversation with Vicki in a wet nightgown?
Vicki's obviously a very determined young woman. Fortunately for us, one of the goals she's always wanted to achieve is becoming a Playmate. Now that it has happened, she'll be spending most of her time traveling around the country, doing promotions for Playboy - a prospect she eagerly anticipates.
"I want to do as much as possible. I know my Playboy work isn't going to last forever and I want to take advantage of all of it while I've got it. It's going to be tough for me to keep my family and friends in Haltom City happy with my being gone so much, but I think we can pull it together. I really want to travel. I haven't seen much of America."
Well, here's your chance, Vicki - to see and be seen. Go for it.
