Have faith in Leola Bell, our Miss February 2012. Raised by a Seventh-Day Adventist minister in Rockville, Maryland, she had always wanted to be a model, but the church didn’t allow her to wear makeup, let alone pose nude for Playboy. She moved to Miami for college at eighteen, and later became a bikini model on the trade circuit. “I had always been interested in Playboy,” she says, “I wanted to participated in a Playboy Golf event in Miami, and I won a free trip to California and a visit to the Mansion.” She played caddy for another year before reps at Studio West called her to test for Playmate. “I was so excited,” she says. “The first thing I did was call my mom and tell her the news. My parents are religious, so this is not the career they would have chosen for me, but they love me and have been very supportive.” Leola lives in Palm Beach, but she’s a regular at the Playboy Mansion, where she made fast friends with her fellow Playmates. So what does a former Seventh-Day Adventist like Leola like to do on a Saturday? First off, she’s a sports fan – she goes for the Heat and the Dolphins, and she likes to hit the sports bar for a game with her friends. She doesn’t mind a night in, either. “I’ve read just about every book Stephen King has ever written,” she says. On a date, she likes to have her door opened and her dinner paid for, and she returns the favor with good manners and conversation – or, being Miss February, a box of conversation hearts. Now that she’s a Playmate, she’s getting involved in humanitarian work – she and Playmate Amanda Cerny teamed up on some relief work for Haiti, and she has future plans to volunteer with PETA and the Humane Society. “I adopted my cat, Green Bean, from a shelter,” she says. “I’m always taking in stray cats, and I’d like to use my earnings as a model to open my own shelter.”
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