Face it; we all love the South. So maybe we were just looking for excuses when we noted that Atlanta and New Orleans had hosted the 1988 political conventions, that Universal Studios had decided to move in on Florida and that Kim Basinger had actually bought her home town in Georgia. Well, we buckled under. Clearly, the South was on some sort of rise, and we wanted to get in on the action. But how? "Why don't we do another Southern-girls pictorial?" someone piped up. "Remember the hit we had in '81?" Indeed, that was the year our photographers descended on Dixie, marching through the ten universities that make up the N.C.A.A.'s Southeastern Conference--Auburn, Vanderbilt, Mississippi State, LSU and the Universities of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. That little trip yielded us not one but two pictorials (Girls of the Southeastern Conference, September and October 1981), as well as enthusiastic whoops and hollers from Confederates and Yankees nationwide. But that was then and this is now. Could we actually pull off a successful encore at the very same schools--eight years later? We conferred with two of our most trusted generals--Contributing Photographers David Chan and David Mecey, whose last mission had been the scrappy but gloriously victorious Girls of the Big East (April). No sooner had we posed the idea to them than Chan and Mecey were suited up and headed South. And did they fare well? Did they ever! Over the next 12 pages, you'll see 45 ladies who could melt even the stoniest of Northerners with little more than a bat of their long lashes. "I've said it before and I'll say it again," concludes Mecey in his own soft Texas drawl, "Southern women are consistently the most exquisite in the country, with perfectly chiseled features and bodies they're proud to show off." Don't believe him, eh? Then just keep turnin' the pages, y'all.
