(Nude) Model Family 

• John Kilbourn

My former missionary companion, Mit Romney, was mad as hell.

“Why does this happen to me all the time? Just when I’m about to come out with a really big story, someone else beats me to the punch.”

What Mit (he’s dropped the superfluous second “t” in a symbolic belt-tightening measure) was referring to, as everyone now knows, was his bombshell revelation that Scott Brown, surprise winner of the Massachusetts race to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, was Mit’s love child, the product of a brief romantic liaison back in the ’60s.

“Who cares if John Edwards finally comes clean about being the father of that wacko Rielle Hunter’s baby? That’s old news! But, as usual, my story gets knocked off the front page.”

Not even the heart-warming moment on a recent Oprah show got much play in the press: there was a great close-up of Mit, his eyes shining, his bottom lip trembling, as his long-lost son, Senator-elect Scott Brown, clearly emotionally worked-up himself, came from behind the curtain to give his long-lost dad a big hug. There was a nice reaction shot of Oprah, wiping her own tears as she witnessed the reunion. Then she limped over (she had recently hurt her meniscus doing an advanced yoga posture with her friend Gayle King) and muscled her way into the hug. The three of them—Mit, Scott and Oprah—hugged for at least 30 seconds, their bodies shaking with convulsive joy. (The group embrace was so intense that Harpo Productions later put out a statement dismissing rumors that Oprah was the new senator’s mom.)

Instead of giving the story the attention it deserved, the media, true to form, focused on the senator-elect’s past as a nude model for Cosmo magazine.

“So what if he stripped down to his birthday suit for a photo shoot,” Mit said, spitting out his words. “Don’t you remember how, on my mission, I posed nude for all those life-drawing classes in Paris? And at least I got naked for the noble cause of art. Whereas my son Scott was, in my opinion, getting mighty close to crossing the line into soft porn. I don’t buy that story of how he needed the cash to pay for law school.”

A number of bloggers out there in the blogosphere have expressed skepticism about Mit’s claim to be the father of Senator-elect Brown. They admit that a passing resemblance exists between Mit and Brown—jaw-line, head size and propensity to political pandering—but point to a marked difference in hairiness between the purported father and son.

The Boston Globe two days ago posted side-by-side photos of the two men in a nude or semi-nude state and called attention to the fact that Mit was a smooth man and that Brown was a hairy man. To this, Mit has a ready answer: “Back then, men didn’t wax their pectorals, or other areas, for that matter. If I went natural, I’d be hairy as an ape.”

As a matter of fact, it was Mit’s diligent attention to regular waxings that led to the discovery that Scott Brown was his begotten son. The aesthetician at the salon on Boylston Street where Mit gets waxed had long suspected that the former governor might have a genetic connection to Mr. Brown, who was also a frequent customer. The aesthetician, Betsy Wozniak of Somerville, discreetly took samples of the men’s chest hairs to a DNA lab just off Harvard Square. Experts confirmed a genetic match, and the next day, Mit got a call from talk show paternity tester Maury Povich, who said, “Governor Romney, with regard to Senator Brown, you are the father.”

The DNA testing was followed up by researchers, who pored over old J.C. Penney underwear ads, and found that in their male modeling days, Mit and Scott were virtually indistinguishable as they posed in formfitting T-shirts and cotton briefs.

Researchers are also trying to determine when exactly Mit hooked up with Scott’s mom. My suspicion is that the coupling occurred during that wild Woodstock weekend just after Mit and I got home from our mission to Paris. Both of us were young and energetic, and the hippie chicks swaying to the music and ingesting various hallucinogens were not unreceptive to our overtures. Anything could have happened, and Scott is proof that it did.

Meanwhile, Republican operatives are gearing up for the 2012 presidential election, and right now it looks like America will get a chance to elect the first fatherand-son running mates.