Free Preview: Playmate of the Month April 1971 - Chris Cranston

In the film <i>Funny Girl</i>, it was abundantly apparent that Florenz Ziegfield's formula for the <i>Follies</i> - in addition to an array of big-name stars - included a queen-sized regiment of chorus girls to complement the song-and-dance offerings of Fanny Brice, et al. One of the stunning chorines in that movie was 24-year-old Chris Cranston, who herewith makes a repeat appearance in Playboy; she debuted in our September 1968 <i>Girls of Funny Girl</i> feature. Soon after that first full page exposure, she was signed as a regular on the <i>Playboy After Dark</i> TV show and her second career - modeling - began to take off meteorically in the Southern California area, where she was born and raised. Then came commercials and bit movie parts, plus an invitation to appear in a local Los Angeles TV talk show. It was in the course of that televised conversation that Chris learned of an upcoming U.S.O troop-visiting tour of Vietnam. "What interested me particularly," she explains, "was that this wasn't the usual entertainers' whistle-stopping trip. Instead, the idea was to have us travel into isolated areas of the country, meet the guys stationed there and talk with them at length." For two and a half weeks, Chris and her group made helicopter forays into remote bases, where they entertained and chatted informally with GIs who were unaccustomed to any kind of friendly visitation. "Needless to say, they were delighted to see us." For Chris, however, the most indelible impressions...