Tea and A: Proper ladies become pinups for good causes

The world of girlie calendars, long ruled by nudie cuties, is making room for mums' bums as middle-age women grit teeth, drop trou and bare all for beloved causes. Housewives strip to raise money for health care, seniors to improve services, environmentalists to save the trees.

The Ladies of Rylstone calendar is dedicated to Miss February's (Angela Baker) husband, who died of leukemia.

The hardest part, say mature calendar girls, is the first few moments of disrobing before the camera. "Once you get the clothes off, it becomes easier with every passing moment," says Mallory Pred, who posed as Miss December in an artsy 2001 calendar designed to raise funds to protect Saltspring Island in British Columbia.

All that mature flesh, coming out of hiding, might seem cause to wince and flee in a society obsessed with perky silicone breasts and size-5 thighs.

But quite the opposite happened when the pioneering Ladies of Rylstone, eleven English lovies ages 45-66 poured perfectly proper cups of tea in perfectly improper attire for a photo shoot that became the blushing calendar sensation of 1999.

Wearing nothing but a string of pearls, with strategically placed props, they knit and embroider, press cider and make jam in the snappily captioned sepia-toned photos. "No need for baking powder," reads the line for Miss March, caught sifting flour in the kitchen with her twice-risen bosom billowing over a bowl.

Miss January from the artsy 2001 calendar designed to raise funds to protect Saltspring Island in British Columbia.

The calendar was released in spring last year at the ladies' local village pub, with a printing of 1,000. It sold out in a week. At last count, some 300,000 copies of the British and North American editions had raised almost $750,000 for the ladies' cause: leukemia and lymphoma research.

Suddenly, everything old was new again. "In Rockland, Maine (pop. 6,000), the lobster capital of the world, there is hardly a shop the entire length of Main Street which does not have the Ladies of Rylstone WI Calendar prominently on sale," wrote one fan to the London Times, "but then Down-Easterners have a good eye for beauty in full sail."

People magazine declared the calendar girls "The U.K.'s hottest female ensemble since the Spice Girls."

"We had no idea it would be as big as this. In fact, we wondered who would buy calendars with us on," says Miss February, Angela Baker, who will join Miss October's Tricia Stewart in Seattle on Nov. 21 to promote a 2001 edition of the calendar. Same photos, new year. (They'll sign copies from 6 to 7 p.m. at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St.)

The 2001 calendar, $10.95 U.S., has already sold 150,000 copies.

Baker says it began as a joke, at a monthly meeting of the Women's Institute in Rylstone, an organization of rural women started to preserve traditional crafts. Perhaps, the women teased, they could perform those traditional crafts in the buff for an alternative calendar.

"It remained as a joke between us for nearly a year until John, my husband, became ill in February 1998 with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. We wanted to raise money and the idea of the calendar became a possibility," says Baker. "The wonderful thing is that John knew about it and laughed with us about it.

"He was going to be the token man who could watch the photographs being taken, but he was never well enough."

John Baker, who died in July 1998, had grown sunflowers to give to friends, in the hope he would recover by the time they flowered. To honor him, and raise money for medical research, the women pressed ahead with their calendar. Along with bodies in full bloom, each photo included a yellow sunflower, in tribute to John.

"He didn't believe we would ever do it," says Angela Baker.

The behind-scenes stories of the Rylstone home shoot are already legend. One calendar girl called others to remind them to loosen bra straps to avoid red marks in photos. Another promised to push the button for her photographer husband, who was to dash from the room after setting up tripod shots with the women still in dressing gowns.

That strategy failed. It was Miss May, fortified with claret, who finally bared all for the photographer. "I had to go first, or I would have lost my bottle," Miss May, Moyra Livesey, said in an interview with London's Daily Express.

The smashing success of the calendar spawned scores of nudealikes. Just north of Washington state's border, a group of seniors -- male and female -- stripped to raise funds for the Tsawwassen Kinsmen's Recreation Centre. A Vancouver Sun news story said 90-year-old Miss December would be "lying coyly in a cake -- icing in the appropriate places of course -- with her legs draped gracefully over the sides and a bare arm raising a glass of champagne."

Across the Strait of Georgia a group of Saltspring Island women, inspired by the Ladies of Rylstone, went au naturel in the name of nature. A significant chunk of their lush green island, largest in the Gulf Islands chain that lies north of the San Juans, is being clearcut by a land corporation. The Saltspring Women: Preserve and Protect calendar, on sale at Elliott Bay Book Co., University Book Store, Borders and online at www.savesaltspring.com, is part of a fund-raising effort to purchase sensitive acreage.

The striking black-and-white photos, shot outdoors by professional Howard Fry, are more wood sylph than frumpy mum. Women, ages 18 to 76, hike a hill with backpacks brushing bare derrieres, drink water from a marshy pond, peek out from behind the lone tree left standing in a clearcut.

"It felt really good to be naked and free, but I'm 49 years old and I've had a couple of kids," says Miss January, Andrea Collins, the woman behind the tree and former wife to pop star Phil Collins. "When Howard started taking the pictures I kept thinking that I didn't have a whole lot to hide behind in that clearcut. Just one little tree!"

Stripping in a clearcut is its own kind of poetry. So is a 63-year-old leaning against an old-growth Douglas fir, a tree known on the island as "The Grandmother."

That 63-year-old, Mallory Pred, says she worried about what friends and family would think, but felt she had to do "something brave."

The retired psychotherapist gathered courage by calling on the myth of the Emperor's New Clothes, repeating a line from Bob Dylan -- "Even the president of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked" -- and Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," the Greek play about women holding a sex strike to force their men to end the Peloponnesian War, and an enduring statement about the power of the female body.

The Saltspring calendar, priced from $15.95-$19.95 U.S., has 15,000 copies in print. The initial run was 5,000. The models have been featured in several newspaper spreads in Canada and will be interviewed on CBS-TV this week.

The ladies of Saltspring may be poised to take off like the Ladies of Rylstone, who danced so quickly into the international spotlight wearing only their pearls.

Britain's Lady Godivas have received thousands of fan letters, addressed only to "Miss March" or "Miss October." They've been asked to model at the swank Savoy in London during British Fashion Week. They posed nude on 40-foot billboards advertising Surf washing powder. And, after a bit of a tiff over who would produce it, their story is being turned into a film with British actors and director, backed by Disney-owned Buena Vista International. Shooting starts next year.

All the notoriety, and all the knockoffs, have prompted some observers to bemoan a certain loss of innocence in the charitable Everywoman calendar market. One Glasgow columnist complained the "novelty is wearing thinner than the models."

Still, the calendars are for a good cause -- and they give pause.

Why do calendars celebrating soft flesh and crow's feet and faces pulled by gravity sell? Perhaps because they're real. Perhaps because the images are so perfectly ordinary, and so perfectly extraordinary, a high hallelujah to the mundanities of human flesh.

"The calendar shows that people exist in all shapes, sizes, body types, and -- most importantly -- ages," writes Dr. Paul Rapoport, professor at the School of the Arts at McMaster University in Canada, in a review of the Rylstone calendar for Amazon.com.

"Why don't older women have the right to be without clothes?"

P-I reporter M.L. Lyke can be reached at 206-448-8344 or m.l.lyke@seattle-pi.com

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