Fresh out of high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 18-year-old ex-cheerleader Laura Misch was confronted with that same question that has plagued most new high school graduates: What now? Wandering into a neighborhood drugstore, she happened to pick up a slick paperback entitled Playboy Bunnies. Sh ...e leafed through it. She pictured herself with rabbit ears and a Bunny tail. She had an idea! "I dashed off a letter, enclosed a Polaroid of myself and sent it to the New Orleans Bunny Mother, since she was the closest to Tulsa," Laura recalls. "The next thing I knew, I was in New Orleans with a new job." Within a few weeks, she'd fallen madly in love with the place. Even today, two years later, she will wax rhapsodic about the delights of the old French city. "Except for the humidity," she says, "I adore everything about New Orleans. I'll never leave." This creates a conflict in her life, for she also wants to be a movie star ("Who doesn't?") and most stars have to emigrate to Hollywood sooner or later. No longer a Bunny since the temporary closing of the New Orleans Club some months ago, Laura has just finished an on-location shooting as an extra in Dino De Laurentiis' new film, Mandingo, starring James Mason and Susan George. In the movie, which is about life on a slave-breeding plantation in the pre-Civil War South, Laura plays one of the girls in a Mississippi delta whorehouse. This is how she describes her big scene: "A door opens and through the doorway you see me standing there, clutching my underwear. Then I blow a sensuous kiss to a satisfied customer." Since it was her first scene in a movie, and she appeared seminude, to boot, Laura admits to having had a certain initial apprehension. "I thought it would be awful with all those people watching me," she says. "But they were good about it and kept their eyes on my face." If you say so, Laura.

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