Glendale’s Melody Rose Williams was one of Denver’s first Playboy Bunnies at the local club in the ’70slocated on top of what’s now the Warwick Hotel.
These days she’s sneaking up on 60 and has written her own book about the ear-y adventure: “The Melody of a Playboy Bunny.”
If she doesn’t tell it all, she tells us a lot. She graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School and went to the University of Colorado at Boulder. But skipping a French test to go skiing resulted in bad grades and a lost scholarship, which landed her back in Denver waiting tables at Piccadilly Restaurant.
“But groups of guys kept walking out on their tabs,” she tells me. “And I had to pay. Then a girl told me I could be a Bunny!”
A 17.5 percent tip was included in the tab at the Playboy Club, and Williams was soon working there in ears and a cotton tail, delivering drinks with the iconic “Bunny dip.”
They made her lose 10 pounds first — then maintain the weight. Didn’t she feel objectified?
“I loved it,” Williams says. “I didn’t feel bad when everyone was burning their bras. We were having too much fun to burn our bras.” And, she says, everything at the club was on the up-and-up. No dating customers — or anything else, buster.
She finished her Bunny career in Los Angeles, quitting before she turned 35, the age bunnies were forced to retire their tail.
Along the way, she worked with modeling agency J.F. Images in Denver, appeared in “Scarecrow,” filmed in Cañon City with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. And like every Bunny in history, she has a picture of herself with Bill Cosby.
“The Denver girls were all beautiful,” she says. “We all had a lot of fun and made a lot of money. We had the whole ball of wax.”
For a copy of the book, call 303-691-3726.
Boo to you.
Wicked Garden on Larimer opens tonight with a VIP party — just in time to warm you up for Halloween.
The Jet Hotel people, who run Wicked Garden, will throw a Studio 54 party Friday at Jet.
But here are my top three Halloween picks:
• The Nacho Men at the Bull & Bush.
• The Dead Celebrities Halloween Party at La Boheme topless club, where you “come as your favorite dead celebrity or star whose career is dead.”
• The Curtis Hotel becomes the Haunted Hotel, with 15,000 square feet of party rooms (Bates Motel, Vampire Lair, Dracula’s Blood Room and Area 51), three DJs, three bands, a smoking patio overlooking Denver, and smoking-hot hosts such as Renee Herlocker, Avs stars Paul Stastny, Tyler Arnason, Wojtek Wolski and party men Kevin Joseph and Schuyler Hoversten.
City spirit.
Notices on the door of Ocean say the owner wants the space back and the operation owes about $27,000 in back taxes, a drop in the bucket compared with the notices that went up at Prime 121 recently. . . . Cherry Creek florist D.L. Guenin died last weekend; funeral at 10:30 a.m. today at Good Shepherd Catholic Church. . . . Sez who: “Nothing on Earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.” Steve Almond
Bill Husted’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Husted also appears Tuesdays and Fridays on “Good Day Colorado” on Fox 31. You can reach him at 303-954-1486 or bhusted@ . Take a peek at Husted’s next column at . /husted.
