A former editor-in-chief of Playgirl and OU alumna told the story of her hiring and firing at Glidden Recital Hall last night.
In the one-woman play Centerfold
Ronnie Koenig narrated her real life experience at Playgirl through the character Dori Richter, who landed a job as a writer for Bang, a women's entertainment magazine featuring hoards of nude males donning outfits such as hard hats with suspenders or cowboy hats.
Throughout the show, constant laughter followed Koenig's blunt remarks about her experience in the pornography industry.
Dori entered Bang as a reserved young journalist desperate for a job in New York City. She willingly accepted the position at the magazine even though she was unattracted to the beefcakes found in its pages; her only other job prospect was as a Subway sandwich artist.
Dori bit the bullet and told her ultra-conservative parents of her new job. They accepted her career but asked, Is this what we sent you to college and graduate school for?
In the play, the editor-in-chief at Bang was sexually harassed by a male co-worker, causing her to resign and thus promoting Dori to editor-in-chief of the magazine after only working there for a year.
As an editor-of-chief of a women's pornography magazine, Dori felt she finally had a great party conversation. Her mission statement as editor-of-chief included: to find the women who read Bang and encourage them that it is OK to like sex, and not dirty to like the spreads in the magazine.
Scouring the letters to the editor, Dori found that gay males wrote the majority of the editorials. She refused to believe just because a man's wearing a hard hat and suspenders means he's gay.
Dori's career also affected her personal life. Her boyfriend Adrian, who she described as total opposite of the Bang models, started working out and traded his biker jacket for a muscle tee. She hated this, and warned him to stay away from the baby oil.
In a contest to win a date with the centerfold of the century of Bang magazine, Dori found her Bang reader: Sarah, a divorced mother of two from the Midwest who was unashamed to read Bang and enjoyed it.
At the height of her career as editor-in-chief at Bang, Dori was invited on The O'Reilly Factor to debate the merits of porn. At the beginning of the interview, she was shut down by Bill O'Reilly and his harsh comments. Dori pulled herself together and said to O'Reilly, We can learn a lot from a culture by the way it entertains itself.
A short time after her appearance on The O'Reilly Factor Dori's supervisor told her, We tried it but it didn't work out
and fired her. A gay man replaced her.
Dori returned home after being fired to find her boyfriend dressed up in her male fantasy character, holding only a pizza box in front of his naked body.
Koenig remained in character throughout the show, performing all the characters' voices. Earlier in the day, she appeared on a panel to discuss magazines as entertainment for the College of Communication's Journalism Day.
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Kallie Hinton
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Former editor of Playgirl and Ohio University alum Ronnie Koenig points out potential Bang girls during her one-woman show entitled Centerfold
which was preformed in the auditorium of Glidden Hall Thursday night. Koenig's show is based on her experie
