Lynnda Kimball is the victim of an unusual occupational hazard. She was working as a part-time photo stylist in Playboy's West Coast studio when someone asked her to pose for the gatefold. It's a familiar story, the stuff of late shows and soapers: A jaded staff photographer, unable to recognize the ... obvious when they're staring him right in the old F-stop, one day put on his glasses, pulled the hair from over his eyes and beheld the lovely Lynnda. Rumor has it that a tiny electronic flash went off in his frontal lobe as the full extent of his discovery became evident. The only thing that puzzles us is why it took so long. Attentive readers (we have no other kind) noted Lynnda's potential last year in the July pictorial Heady Stuff (she was the model perched atop two giant lips) and again on the August cover (she was the boardwalk waif ogled by a crowd of comic-strip crazies). Before she wandered in front of our viewfinder, Lynnda lived with a friend in Bolinas, a seacoast town above San Francisco. "I was one of those people," says Lynnda, "who think California begins when you cross the Golden Gate Bridge driving north. There's no toll and the first thing you see is the rainbow on the arch of the tunnel leading into Marin County." There she raised vegetables in her back yard, sampled the dry red wines of the region, reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy and enjoyed what are sometimes called the country comforts. "When I lived in the middle of nowhere, I did next to nothing and that felt natural. Then I moved to Los Angeles. It was a head-on collision. Suddenly, I was pure adrenaline. It took a while for my body to adjust to the rush. Now I'm addicted to the chaos. I've become an adrenaline junkie." To satisfy her activity habit, Lynnda attends courses at Los Angeles City College and then goes across town to take acting, fencing, dancing and speech lessons at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. Although it sounds like she's preparing for the lead role in a women's lib song-and-dance swashbuckler, she has no plans for a Hollywood career -- she doesn't even own a television set: "An acting class just seemed to be the right thing to take in Los Angeles. Like a Berlitz course in a foreign language -- it helps me understand and communicate with the natives. And besides, it's a lot of fun. Your mind and body have to be quite agile onstage. We do exercises that help shed inhibitions and free the instrument for self-expression. I am more aware of my body now than I've ever been before." And so are we.

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