The third issue of Plain Brown Wrapper is in the archive. Vol. 2, No. 3 from Fall 1975 is the issue Rick Tedesco teased at the end of his Summer letter and the one readers had been writing in about since Spring. Phil S. in Tulsa wrote asking for it. Gerald in Düsseldorf wrote asking for it, in better English than Phil. The theme is body hair, and the whole cover line is Au Naturel: Three Women Who Never Shaved.
Rick's essay opens with a photograph by an unnamed French photographer shot in a studio apartment in the Marais — a woman standing at an open window with both arms raised. "The hair is not a statement," he writes. "It is just hair." The rest of the essay is Rick refusing to have the argument. He is not interested in whether body hair is natural or unkempt. "Both sides are telling women what to do with their own bodies, which is the one thing both sides insist they are not doing." He is interested, he says, in the photograph. Underarm hair catches light in a way smooth skin does not. A full natural bush has a shape as particular to a woman as the line of her jaw. "These are not political statements. They are facts about what things look like."
The cover girl is Lucia Sorrentino, 26, a legal secretary at a firm on 47th Street in Midtown. She grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, third of four daughters of a man who drove a bread truck. Rick met her at a party in Little Italy in July with her arm raised on the cabinet above the refrigerator. He asked if he could photograph her there. She said she wasn't dressed for it. He said that was the point. Rick's note about the shoot: "She said she had never been asked to keep her arms up and that most photographers immediately wanted to fix her. I told her there was nothing to fix."
Mara Callahan, 29, works as a physical therapy assistant at a hospital near Gramercy Park. She is from Woodside, Queens, and she has auburn hair that changes with the light — brown in shadow, red in the afternoon, copper in the hotel room where Rick shot her on two consecutive Tuesdays in September. She said yes immediately. "She had been waiting for someone to ask her in a way that did not make her feel like the point was to clean her up. The point, she said, was her."
Sofia Ramos, 31, is a seamstress at a bridal shop on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx — eleven years, four hundred dresses. She grew up in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico and has been in New York since nineteen. Rick spotted her on the 4 train in August holding the overhead bar with both arms raised and spent twenty minutes gathering the nerve to ask for her card. She did not have a card. She wrote her number on a MetroCard transfer. The shoot was at her apartment on the Grand Concourse, standing at the window with her arms up long enough that her shoulders started to burn. Rick says it is the best image he has ever taken and he means it.
On the Square keeps its three pages and its twelve women. The theme threads through — Vera F. feeding pigeons in Central Park, Carol P. at the end of her shift in Hell's Kitchen, Nancy O. on her Upper West Side rooftop saying she has not shaved since 1968 and does not plan to start. Adele K. the Chinatown acupuncturist told Rick her patients would recognize her and she did not care in the least. Yolanda T. drives the M11 every day and nobody on the route knows her face; she wanted to change that.
From the Booth reviews The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1975, Radley Metzger under his Henry Paris alias) at the Rialto. Rick gives it four out of five and complains about the ending. "Real stories do not end that way. Still, the hotel room scene. Worth the two dollars."
What Rick Likes is Katz's Delicatessen on Houston. Four hundred visits since his father took him at twelve, always the pastrami on rye, always cut thick by a counterman whose name he has never learned. Carmen will not eat there because the lighting makes everyone look like they are about to die. Rick says she is right about the lighting, and the pastrami is worth it.
Reader Mail has Phil S. and Gerald writing in again, this time to say the issue delivered. T.W. in Cleveland had the Issue 2 centerfold sideways for two weeks before realizing you had to rotate it. Anonymous from Queens still wants to know who Carmen is.
Same archive as the previous two issues — Rick's filing cabinet, transferred to a private collector in 2019. The color reproduction holds up. The centerfold shows the fold crease on Lucia's body. The Kodachrome highlights and the warm interior shadows print cleanly on the heavy coated stock. Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent.