When 21-year-old Cynthia Albritton met Jimi Hendrix on a cold Chicago night in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel in 1968, she asked if she could plaster cast his penis. She was so nervous that she stuttered, but Jimi said he’d heard about her in the cosmos and invited her up to his room. The Jimi Hendrix Experience had just played a show at the Civic Opera House, and Cynthia and her casting mates had followed the band’s limousine after the set. They were in Dianne’s car, trying to catch the band’s attention by waving their official suitcase with the Plaster Casters of Chicago logo (that Cynthia designed) through the window. It worked. They accompanied the band to Room #1628, casted two of the three band members, and Cynthia had sex with her favorite bassist. Cynthia told me, “That was an unbelievable evening.”
Her horoscope for that day told her that she was about to get what she most wanted. In one skillfully playful swoop, she deftly integrated music, art, and sex.
Growing up in Chicago, Cynthia loved to draw. She was a fan of The Beatles, whose music made her want to have sex, even if she didn’t really know what that exactly meant. In 1964, high school chums Kathy Barnett and Cynthia figured out how to meet rock bands: when The Rolling Stones rolled into town, the gal pals hung around their hotel. Sometimes, Cynthia climbed a hotel’s fire escape to catch a glimpse of a band she loved. If security guards turned her away from the hotel, she dodged them through the stairwells.
“It’s all a mad, rock ‘n’ roll blur,” Cynthia said in a video clip about her plaster casting life from 2012’s “Rock Scene Magazine,” her hair and make-up reminiscent of sex symbol Marilyn Monroe (platinum hair, creamy white eye shadow, black eyeliner and peachy lips). “I wanted to keep on meeting more cute mop-top boys because this exciting life was the life for me.” She’d been a “shy, fledgling, virginal goofy girl that wanted to get laid by cute British boys with long hair and tight pants. But I wasn’t experienced or seductive….” so, she believed that the “only way I could go about getting the zippers down” was a goofy, funny way. When Cynthia and I talked on the phone in 2012, she said, “I wasn’t girly. I was a tomboy and the boys in my high school looked down at me because I was very irreverent. But I wasn’t friendless. I had enough pals.”
