Model Pat McGuire

Patricia "Pat" McGuire is a model who worked extensively in the 1970s and 1980s.

Originally represented by the famed Wilhelmina modeling agency, she was modeling through Elite Elegance by the late eighties.

British sixties model Jill Kennington

Jill Kennington has led what you might call a full, rich life. :-)

Ms. Kennington was discovered by a modeling agent in London in while working at the famed Harrods department store. She modeled during the height of the Swinging London period of the mid-1960s, and she later lived and worked in Paris and Rome. She worked with legendary photographers such as David Bailey, and her assignments took her all over the world.

Today, Jill Kennington is a photographer, a vocation she began in 1982, and she lives in the English countryside in West Dorset. You can learn the details of her incredible biography in an interview with her by going to this link.

Fun fact: Jill Kennington had a small part in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic movie Blow Up.

TV reporter Weijia Jiang

Like most TV reporters, Weijia Jiang has moved from one local TV station to another. She did so before getting the plum job all TV news reporters secretly yearn for: a job in New York.

She was the Washington correspondent for WBRE-TV in Scranton, Pennsylvania and a reporter, substitute anchor, and substitute producer at WBOC-TV in Salisbury, Maryland before going to WJZ-TV, CBS's affiliate in Baltimore.  She left to join the local news deaprtment of CBS's New York station, WCBS-TV, where she has been since June 2012.

But here are a few facts about Weijia Jiang that may interest you. Not only did she and her family emigrate from China when she was a little girl, they originally settled in West Virginia. She's also a graduate of the College of William and Mary, where she studied philosophy and chemistry. So she certainly brings a unique perspective as a reporter for WCBS-TV.

TV newswoman Holly Headrick

Holly Headrick is a TV news anchorwoman from North Carolina who was born and raised in that state and has never worked anywhere else.

She anchors the morning news broadcast at WLOS-TV in Asheville, an ABC affiliate. She's a graduate of the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holding a journalism/mass communication degree, and she worked earlier as a reporter for WWAY-TV in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she earned the Associated Press Rookie of the Year award.

Before going on the air at WLOS-TV, Ms. Headrick was a producer and an assignment editor at that station. Also, while at WLOS-TV, she has worked with local law enforcement agencies on her Fugitive Files segment, which has brought many at-large criminal suspects to justice.

Political commentator Karen Finney

Karen Finney is a political consultant who has found a second career as a pundit, both in print and on the air.

A former press secretary to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Virginia-born-and-bred Ms. Finney also served as spokesperson and communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Today she is a columnist for The Hill, a daily newspaper covering Congress, as well as a commentator for Politico and the Huffington Post. She's also a frequent commentator on the MSNBC cable news channel.

Her exotic looks come from her biracial background; she has a black father an a white mother. And - I am not making this up - she is a descendant of Robert E. Lee on her mother's side.

Model Kelly Emberg

Kelly Emberg is yet another eighties model whose beauty and elegance made that decade bearable.

She appeared in ads for Cover Girl cosmetics and Napier jewelry (which you know about), but she's probably best known for being the girlfriend of British rock star Rod Stewart for much of the eighties.  They had a daughter, Ruby, born in 1987, and they broke up in 1990.

In the nineties, the Houston-born Ms. Emberg studied interior design at the University of California at Los  Angeles and worked in the field, taking on clients as such as Pam Dawber, Mark Harmon  and, ironically, Rod Stewart.  (It's nice to know that they still respected each other.)

She now has her own fruit and vegetable garden, and she's active in getting others to grow their own food in a sustainable, environmentally friendly manner through her Web site.

Actress/model Yaya DaCosta

Yaya DaCosta is a actress who got discovered through a reality competition show. She was an also-ran on "America's Next Top Model," which led to her budding - and successful - acting career.

And she's definitely got the look. :-)

She appeared in the 2006 dance movie Take the Lead and also had supporting roles in the art film The Kids Are All Right and the sci-fi movie Tron: Legacy. In addition to several one-shot parts on TV shows, she's also appeared on Broadway, as part of the cast of The First Breeze of Summer in the 2008-09 season.

A graduate of Brown University, she's fluent in Portuguese, French and Spanish, as well as English.

Actress and comedian Whitney Cummings

Whitney Cummings is the latest in a series of comedians who play fictionalized versions of themselves on television. The difference is, she just happens to be a woman.

On her NBC show "Whitney," Ms. Cummings lives with her boyfriend and, based on her own observations of other couples, tries various unconventional means to keep their relationship exciting.

She's also one of the show's executive producers.

British TV personality Christine Bleakley

Christine Bleakley is, you might say, the Meredith Vieira of British television.

She co-hosted the topical magazine show "The One Show" on the BBC with Adrian Chiles from 2007 to 2010, and both of them hosted the morning show "Daybreak" on the commercial ITV network from 2010 to 2011.  Today, still at ITV, she hosts "Dancing On Ice," a British contest show like "Dancing With the Stars," only it involves figure skating.     

Model Debara Bertin

Debara Bertin is a model from the seventies and eighties who, when she was working in Paris, was represented by the Covers agency.

   

In the early eighties, she was prominently featured in an ad for Revlon's European Collagen Complex cream, from which this picture is taken. The ad promised younger-looking skin within ten days after beginning use of the product. The focus here on her full face, with her hair pulled back, certainly made for an effective selling point. :-)

Newswoman Lauren Ashburn

Lauren Ashburn is a reporter from the old media - television and newspapers - who's currently invested in the new media. 

Having been a contributor to CBS's "The Early Show" and an anchor and reporter for WJLA-TV, Washington, D.C.'s ABC affiliate, she was also a reporter for USA Today.  Today she is the editor of the Daily Download, a Web site she founded that features news stories and commentary and reports on social media.  

She regularly appears on the PBS Newshour with Howard Kurtz, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," to talk about the various trends in social media and Internet news reporting.  

March 2013: Commentary

Before I begin my new A-Z round of beautiful women, I'd like to make additional comments about the popularity of Kristen Welker on this blog, as well as some comments on a semi-related story that has only now grabbed my attention.

I was going over my earlier statistics, and I noticed how much time I let lapse at one point in checking my statistics. In May 2012, the last time I reported statistics here before October 2012, my original post of Ms. Welker wasn't even in the top ten; by October, it was in second place, quickly taking the lead thereafter. So, even though it appeared that she came out of nowhere to become the most popular subject on this blog, my post of her more likely made its way up the stats chart more gradually, and that its rise in popularity was not so meteoric.

Be that as it may, I'm now keeping close tabs on my daily, weekly, and monthly statistics to see if posts depicting anyone else might break into the top ten and possibly be contenders for the number one spot. (Numbers for posts in the lower five positions on the all-time top ten list appear to have stagnated, while posts not yet on that list are showing strong activity.) But I have to say once again that I'm very pleased that a post of a biracial woman, at a time of increased racial animosity in America, has gotten so much attention. Not just in pageviews, but in comments; my original post of Ms. Welker has received ten comments, all favorable (adjectives used to describe her have included "hot," "smart," "beautiful," "knowledgeable," "articulate," "focused," "elegant," and "professional"). Her transcendental quality as a woman of black and white origin proves that racism is slowly dying.

But it's dying too slowly. Once, the modeling trade was dominated by the likes of black superstars such as Naomi Sims, Pat Cleveland, Alva Chinn, Iman, the two Johnsons - Beverly and Sheila - and Louise Vyent, all of whom have appeared on this blog. (Not to mention that hot VW from Detroit, Veronica Webb. :-D) Inexplicably, however, black models have slowly been disappearing from the scene since the mid-1990s, and to the point where they're few and far between these days. So I was shocked when an international fashion magazine recently printed pictures of a white American female model posing as an "African Queen." The pictures (which I won't show here) in Numéro magazine show model Ondria Hardin, 16, wearing bronze makeup and darkened hair to make her look "black."

As a white man who has always been attracted to black women (I had severe crushes on some of the women mentioned in the previous paragraph), I was appalled by this blatant racism and outright mockery of the black race, particularly at a time when few of today's black models seem to be able to cultivate a high profile, and I wasn't happy with Numéro's non-committal apology that expressed regret "if" anyone was offended while defending the artistic expression of the folks involved. Disgusting. Anyway, I certainly have no intention of ever featuring Ondria Hardin on this blog once she turns eighteen. And when I found out that Constance Jablonski, a French model of Polish descent who was to appear in my next A-Z round, did a similar fashion editorial in brown makeup and an Afro wig, I decided not to feature her, either. They're both banned for life here. I'm not going to endorse any model who engages in such minstrelsy. These young women are old enough to know better and refuse such assignments. Beverly Johnson, remember, famously decided to stop accepting assignments for cigarette and liquor ad assignments because she no longer wanted to be associated with ad campaigns that promote smoking and drinking. She gave up a lot of lucrative assignments, and her agents were unhappy about it. She may have lost work, but she kept her principles. Too bad today's Caucasian models can't do the same.

All right, time to get off my soapbox. The next post will feature a woman I haven't featured before. I promise. :-)