I first met Sarah while heading in to a science fiction convention in, I think Philadelphia, although it could have been Baltimore. A close friend of mine who was kind of a dickhead, but in an entertaining way, was driving and he stopped the car to say hello to her. At the time she had her hair cut into this Cleopatra bob and chainsmoked seductively. My dickhead friend greeted her calling her Cleo and giving her a good-natured hard time. She indignantly claimed that she was a hippie chick and not gothic at all and could he call her Sarah damn it. Then she launched into a long story about a well-endowed guy she had just started a whirlwind romance with. I was instantly charmed. She was cheerfully sexual in front of total strangers and in fact her first memory of actually talking to me is not then, but when Blue Blood fiction writer Shariann Lewitt and I road-tripped together to her mom’s place in Bumfuck, Virginia.

She turned up a year or so later for a party at my legendary punk rock group house Cambodia. And moved in. Nobody really ever took a vote or anything. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who had cheated on her while she was at a funeral, and she saw no reason to go back to his place. Eventually one of the people who lived in the house complained that he had never been consulted about her moving in. She and I laughed about that for years because no one had been consulted. She is just one of those people where the next stop on the line just always kind of happens for her. It always seems like she is on the edge of a precipice, but she has more lives than the luckiest cat.

Sarah used to write for Black Leather Times or more affectionately BLT, my punk rock humor zine. She also wrote the fiction piece “Accept No Substitutes” for my anthology Backstage Passes: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Erotica from the Pages of Blue Blood Magazine. She has also written for Penthouse Variations. The thing most people probably remember her for, however, was her stint as spokesmodel for Blue Blood in print. She appeared in both issue #1 and on the cover of issue #5. She is the only girl I have ever known who could pull off the innocent pixie look with breasts that big falling out of her top and that look is burned in the memories of many who stopped by the Blue Blood booth or permanent floating party at conventions like DragonCon and CastleCon.

Sarah is the first person, other than myself, who I photographed nude. I’m pretty sure it was in Philadelphia that we first met. I think it was the PhilCon where S.N. Lewitt got into trouble for being seen brandishing a watergun in a hallway in a leather jacket late at night with the bad kids.

--Amelia G