The familiar hollywood saga of child stardom – all too often ending in both real life and reel life with a fast fade-out when adolescence rears its ugly head – has been refreshingly rewritten by Donna Michelle, the azure-eyed 18-year-old who adorns our December gatefold. In the years since her triple flowering as a grade-school piano prodigy, drama-contest winner and bantam ballerina with the New York City Ballet, Donna has ripened under the Southern California sun into a mature mistress of her performing arts – and an offbeat beauty with a style and a mind emphatically her own. An honor graduate from L.A.'s Reseda High School, she enrolled this fall at UCLA for an ambitious 18-hour curriculum running the academic gamut from art history to abnormal psychology. "It's a scholastic smorgasbord," she admits, "but with my appetite for learning, I don't think I've bitten off more than I can chew." In the category of between-meal snacks, Donna's varied diet of recreational reading ranges currently from Dante's Inferno ("La Dolce Vita with central heating") to Atlas Shrugged ("After the second chapter, so did I"). Equally discerning, if a bit more impulsive, in her choice of beaux, she digs the kind of guy "who's been around and looks it, who's worldly-wise without being world-weary, articulate and affirmative, but somewhat skeptical about the holiness of sacred cows." Most important in a man, feels Donna, are two qualities: the courage to demand the right to be himself, and the grace to grant the same privilege to everyone else. "But I can't ask what I can't offer," she confesses. "I'm afraid I have a long list of third-class males who really set my teeth on edge – especially the moral Milquetoast who continues to obey unquestioningly the outmoded codes decreed by society's die-hard guardians of Victorian decency. Fortunately, you can't hold back a flood for long with a dike that's so full of holes. When it finally gives way, maybe we'll begin to understand, accept and, who knows, even rejoice in our sexual identities." We'll drink to that. A Christmas present perfect – triple-featured herein as our holiday Playmate, double-cover girl and one of the 10 pretties we've picked as our favorite Playmates of the decade – Donna herself is reason enough for just such a celebration of feminine physiology.
