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A valid critique of the culture of the Mai-Kai Calendar girl as it truly existed beneath the wraps.
Above: Bob Thornton can't make up his mind over
an application for Mai-Kai Girl.
"Slim and Trim," that was how Leonce Picot Spoke of his wife Kay.
Leonce is said to have conceived the calendars, though none of the girls had his wife's figure or beauty, not to mention a fraction of her wit.
This sultry little thing had a double derriere which couldn't fit into a pair of short shorts without showing. Measuring her thighs at that point would have yielded an easy 26". Her upper thigh was the girth of her waistline.
Bob should have taken measurements.
She may appear "slim" but in reality the lack of abdominal definition in the waistline shows this young woman never did a lick of exercise.
This body the ballet master would have deemed unacceptably "undeveloped."
In 1983, fka Michele Picot tried out for Mai-Kai girl in Kay's old Bora Bora costume, but she was too slim and her bust was too small.
Mai-Kai, Mai-Kai Girl
I Want to be a Mai-Kai Girl!
Here we will see what is actually concealed by the Mai-Kai Calendar girl sarongs.
Bob Thornton declared that becoming a Mai-Kai girl was the most coveted job for young women in the whole State of Florida. It was better than being a doctor, or lawyer, or nurse, or teacher. If you were any kind of girl worth looking at, you had to be a Mai-Kai Girl. Mai-Kai girls were more desirable somehow than the beautiful slim and trim wives married to Bob's staff and brother.
They all divorced, seven little girls in the casualties, and Bob Thornton destroyed his own blood family and robbed his brother and his brother's children. Well, that just happens all the time, so big deal.
Let's go work for Uncle Bob.
By today's standard these young women, starting at 19 years of age just don't make the cut. They all had bad posture. Squeezing your shoulders together in a forward position makes the breast seem larger, from the front. Shoulders are to be carried back and downward, with no outward thrust of the ribcage.
Today it is bad form for a woman to have an extra roll of fat between her upper arm and the top of her bra. That is not part of the breast, but it is a roll of fat from lack of triceps and pectoral tone (left picture). In a sarong bra, these fat rolls are pinched to push out the volume of actual breast tissue.
This layout illustrates how the Mai-Kai bra was good for pushing up saggy breast lacking pectoral development beneath, which, like shoulder pads later accounted for big butts, compensated for what was not so hot below the navel. It was the sarong which hid the worst. Mai-Kai girls were too frequently flabby for their age, which can be seen in the calendars.
So lust away ye gents. These girls would have been laughed out of an audition for a New York ballet class.
But, Bob Thornton had no class. As he said of himself, "Someone has to be an SOB."
And he gets the prize.
This little darling had at least three rolls of buttocks which didn't fit into her tight-fitting bikini, required to audition. And, we must account for the size of bikinis in the 1960's. They were cut to cover the derriere.
Likely, Bob was not breast fed as a baby, and he never attended a classical ballet or he would have known what is a beautiful body. Then again, the grace of a ballerina does not allow for large breasts because they jiggle while in bourree.
It takes work and discipline to have a beautiful body, male or female. It all started with the Greeks who spent half their day sculpting their fascial plane.
There's none of that happening here.
Odd too because at the end of the cocktail hour, it's what's underneath the sarong, not what's in the bra or painted on the face that really counts.
Above: Leonce's own wife was more slim and trim, and more beautiful than any of his Calendar Girls. Plus, she had a brain.
( Leonce complained that Audrey Hepburn was too thin, or Kay would have been thinner, just to keep his attention).
Michele Picot found this picture of her mother in a blog about the cult of the "Tiki Dress." Apparently this dress was also sold on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco and has become a collectible. The caption of the blog author, in California, was,
"Look at the waist on Kay!"
Yes indeed folks, Leonce Picot's wife Kay was more than slim and trim. This dress is belted with fishing rope. Few women can pull off wearing a rope belted dress, after two children, and look so slim and trim in a photograph.
When Leonce had a good night at Liar's Poker, he would buy Kay a teenie bikini, cut much lower on the bottom half than Bob's audition bikini, the following Sunday- a consolation prize for him being out all night. She had drawers of teenie bikinis Leonce bought. A typical girl child fascinated by her mother, Michele would sneak into Kay's dresser and try on a bikini. At ten-twelve years of age, they weren't a good fit. But Kay never wore them either because she knew they were prizes, and she had a certain modesty about her which we call Grace.
She maintained this 5'9" body for life, swiftly fasting away any extra calories she had to consume while researching her foody books. She did not have multiple butts, fat arms, or cellulite, belly flab or bad posture. So WTF?
fka Michele Picot 2022