Wanderlust. Tom Page knows the feeling well. It’s the instinct he gets about every three months, the sense that has him checking over the mental lists he keeps of the places he’d like to visit and those he’d visit again.

With more than 50 foreign countries somewhere in between, Page is making his way around the world, one trip at a time.

“I lived in France when I was a child and we traveled all over Europe at the time and so that kind of got me into it. After I got my Ph.D. and started life as a faculty member, it afforded me a little bit more time to travel,” said Page, an associate marketing professor since 1986.

During that time, he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, rafted through Grand Canyon via the Colorado River and scuba dived pretty much wherever he could find water, although some of his own highlights include trips to Antarctica and Australia.

“I think growing up watching a lot of (TV) programs like National Geographic and Jacques Cousteau and those kind of things (made me want to travel),” he said. “There’s a lot of world out there to get out and see and I want to get out there and see it.”

Exciting exploits

Page said traveling often leads to other kinds of adventures, such as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 1988.

“I’ve always wanted to climb a mountain and the thing about that mountain is, it’s not a technical climb, it’s just strictly a walk-up,” he said. “But it’s 19,000 feet, so you’re getting oxygen deprivation, but it’s a walk-up. That trip also was combined with a five-day safari so we got mountain climbing and the game viewing as well.”

Page added: “I’ve always kind of wanted to do that. I don’t have any real desire to do it again, although I guess I would, but it’s one of those things that was on my list and now it’s done. There’s other things on the list now.”

In the summer of 1999, Page went on an Arctic diving expedition near northern Canada. Since most of the diving he had done since becoming certified in 1990 had been in warmer waters, he said he wanted the challenge of diving under the ice.

“You’re literally in 28.8 degree water and you’ve got a dry suit on and everything else. What’s neat about it is you’re under the ice and you’re looking up and you think, on the surface, the ice is really flat, but underneath you’ve got big cones hanging down and you’ve got lots of formations and stuff and it’s literally like you’re in a cave,” he said. “From that standpoint, it was pretty spectacular diving. Pretty technical diving, too. There were some pretty hard risks involved in that.”

Page said he’s always been fascinated by cold environments.

“I’ve been lots of different places where it’s cold and I keep telling my wife I’ve exhausted all the cold places, now I want to go to the desert and she says ‘I am not going to the desert,’” he said.

Doing it all

Page used to go on his travels by himself or with an organized group trip. A few conferences over the years have taken him to Australia, Singapore and Istanbul — but since he got married in 2002, much of his traveling is done with his wife.

“She’s very adventurous, but she’s not quite as out there as I am. She holds her own. We do a lot of things together. We’ve taken a lot of trips to the Caribbean — although she scuba dives, she doesn’t care for it too much because she has trouble with her ears, but I love to scuba dive,” he said.

How does he do it?

Page said his wife is a self-employed therapist, so the couple has a lot of flexibility in their schedules.

“The best thing about being here, in an environment like (MSU), is that you do have a certain amount of freedom that a lot of people don’t have. I work as many hours as an average office worker a week, but I don’t have to do it 8-5,” he said. When he’s not traveling, Page said he enjoys playing golf and mountain biking in the summer time, as well as lifting weights year-round.

“I actually competed in some contests years ago as a weight lifter, not as a body builder — big difference,” he said. “I was into martial arts and I messed up my shoulder, which also took me out of competition for lifting, so I haven’t done that for quite a while.”

Right now, Page is dreaming of visiting the desert.

“Just because of the difference in the environment. I’ve been to Egypt and we were kind of on the edge of the desert but you’re not out in the desert,” he said. “So I would like to do that just to kind of experience that environment, just see a different part of the world.”

Gaining insight

At 21, Penny Gardner was a divorced mother desperate to find a job to support her three children.

This was in the early ’60s — a time, Gardner said, that was not ripe with opportunities for women who didn’t have secretarial skills.

The best solution she could find was becoming an entry-level cocktail waitress at Washington, D.C.’s Gaslight Club, a members-only “gentlemen’s club.”

“I was thinking that I was not pretty enough for that, but as a matter of fact, I was,” said Gardner, an assistant professor of writing, rhetoric and American culture.

“At the time, I was blonde-haired and blue-eyed and young and able to be a sexual

object and lucky to make money off it like I did,” she said.

From the Gaslight Club, ?Gardner said she was hired as a Playboy bunny for the Playboy Club in Baltimore — a job she describes as both glamorous and exploitative.

“We were accessories to the club.” she said. “Being called ‘bunnies’ dehumanized us as well. Our introduction was ‘Hi, I’m your bunny, Penny,’” said Gardner, who teaches women’s studies courses at MSU and identifies herself as a feminist.

Although many assume being a Playboy bunny translates into posing for a magazine centerfold, Gardner said her job only involved dressing in the skimpy “bunny” costume and working in the club.

“I’ve never been to the Playboy mansion or anything like that,” she said.

The costumes they were required to wear, she said, were complexly designed to accentuate the women’s figures, with high-cut hips to show off their legs and perfectly tailored tops to enhance their cleavage.

She and the other waitresses would jam sponges from the bar underneath their breasts to push them up even higher.

A “bunny mother” would look after the costumes when the women would change into their street clothes to leave for the night because other costume makers wanted to know the secret designs of the costumes, Gardner said.

“The clubs were very good about protecting the women from drunks and any kinds of particular harassment,” she said.

“If there was a problem, we learned to be coquettish and flirt around a situation. I do remember a man, when I was walking by, grabbing a hold of my rear end but I slithered away and kind of gave him a look. But when we left the clubs, anyone could have been waiting for us in the back. Thank God, I never had that experience. We easily could have because we left at 2 or 3 in the morning.”

Practical knowledge

Gardner said the experience was very much a part of the dissertations she wrote when she came to MSU for graduate studies in 1994.

She said her experience has come into context with some of the classes she has taught.

“What I bring to it now is gender analysis — that women were objectified, dehumanized, as well as the racial component,” she said. “If I was anything but white, I would not have got the job. The cutoff age, when I applied, was 23. I had a friend who applied that was 24 and they didn’t hire her. It is a setup of making young men feel entitled to young women serving them.”

Decades later, Gardner said she’s still surprised that her students know the bunny reference.

“Everyone’s familiar with what it is to be a Playboy bunny,” she said. “That icon has lived on for so long and it stands for so much more than what it was.”