Cynthia Plaster Caster’s memoir | Up next

The last time we talked to Cynthia Plaster Caster, we were sitting in her phallus-strewn apartment in Lincoln Park as she kicked off her candidacy for Chicago mayor with cheeky campaign slogans like “Hard on crime.” The self-described recovering groupie, famous for making casts of rock-star penises and breasts, has since admitted the political bid was mostly just a ploy to sell T-shirts, buttons and other merch.

The 64-year-old promises her latest project is sincere. Last week, she launched a $5,000 Kickstarter campaign to help fund the writing of her life story, tentatively titled Plaster of Paradise. Caster says she has a “fine publisher” for the book (though she declined to name it); she just needs some extra money to focus totally on writing.

Caster’s jotted down bits and pieces of her tell-all memoir for more than 20 years, while making ends meet by selling interviews to the European press and hocking reproductions of her molds, including best-seller Jimi Hendrix. “Hendrix got his pubes stuck in the plaster, so he just fucked the mold for 15 minutes,” she says. It’s just one of the many sordid encounters with rock luminaries from Frank Zappa to Karen O that she’s itching to put into print.

But the book will not be just backstage sleaze, Caster says. There’s also the story of a nerdy girl, Cynthia Albritton, raised on the Southeast Side “by a crazy conservative mother and a party-loving father” who died unaware of their daughter’s peculiar hobby.—Jake Malooley

Contribute to Plaster of Paradise through December 21 at kck.st/sSfOuS.