Wonderhussy

It being the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11th, I’ve been obsessively poring over all the photos and testimonials and stuff from that terrible day. And it made me think back to my own 9/11 experience…which was really lame and superficial. I had been living in Vegas for about a year, and had grown tired of it. I had just decided to move back to California anyway…when the attacks happened, and Vegas basically closed down.

Back in those days, I maintained a GeoCities blog called “The Scandalous Diary of a Vegas Playgirl.” I’m such an OG that when I started that site, the world “blog” hadn’t even been coined yet…so I called it my web diary. I updated it once a week from July 2000 until September 2004, and it was a truly fantastic chronicle of my move to Vegas and my subsequent adventures. Remember, I was a virginal teetotaler when I moved here…now look what’s happened to                                                                                  me!

Unfortunately, Yahoo! shut down my site because I violated their terms of service (who, me?!)…but when GeoCities folded back in ’09, the Internet Archive dredged most of it back up via the Wayback Machine. About 1/3 of it still survives here. It’s a hoot to look back on — I had a TON of crazy adventures back then…but amazingly, my adventures have continued to get even better since then. I’m not sure how this is possible, and if this trend will continue. Can my adventures just keep getting exponentially better? Only time will tell…but I’ll try my damnedest, you can be assured of that!

I have also dredged up some old photos to decorate this old blog post. Back then, I didn’t have a digital camera (?!?!?!?!?!), so my blogs were solid text. It’s amazing I had any readers at all! I did have a photo page on my site with some laughable “semi-salacious” photos of myself I had laboriously scanned in, to lure illiterate fans. (What did I know from salacious photos back then?!)

Anyhoo, enjoy this oldie, and please don’t judge me — this was TEN YEARS AGO. What the hell did I know? I make a couple of semi-racist asides in there about Arabs, but it was the national mood at the time, don’t ya know.

Slot Machines in the Time of Strife
diary for the week of September 14, 2001

Last week I was invited by one of my e-fans to come to this whacked-out pro-gun website, on account of my own pro-gun views.  To be polite, I went on over and posted a message in their discussion forum with a link to this page, and…

The next morning I couldn’t even access my own web page anymore!  This site was flooded with gun enthusiasts hoping for a peek at some luscious pro-gun booty!  There were so many visitors that GeoCities could not handle the pressure.  The switchboard got jammed or a fuse was blown or something, and when I tried to check up on the old home page all I got was an error message!

Boy, was I pissed.  I was thinking that I better just buckle down and start paying for space on a server for “sarrrahjane.com,” when — Hallelujah!

I don’t like to say that anything positive came out of this whole World Trade Center/ Pentagon mess, but at least it got those pro-gun wackos away from clogging my circuits.  I guess even they felt foolish ogling underdeveloped titty at a time of national crisis.

Speaking of national crisis, the state of affairs here in Vegas has been dismal.  On the first day of the “Attack on America” (TM) I was snoozing peacefully in my pink canopy bed when my mom called at 11:00am, alerting me to the news.  For the next 48 hours the TV and I were inseparable!  I didn’t have to work that night, but I did have a previously-arranged blind date… so around 10pm I dragged my ass off the couch and went down to Caesars Palace, to the hot new Shadow Lounge.  Driving down the Strip was wonderful.  First of all, the Stratosphere Tower and the fake Vegas Eiffel Tower were closed, because as everyone knows, both are major terrorist targets.  Then, all the casinos that had a heart (the MGM-Mirage-owned ones) had changed their giant TV screen marquees to read “GOD BLESS AMERICA” over the graphic of a proudly waving flag at half-mast.  All the others (Park Place- or Mandalay Resorts-owned properties) kept up their regular “98% payback!” and “$2.99 Steak and Eggs!” shtick.  Boo!  Hiss!  Where is patriotism, I ask?  The MGM was especially careful to show their patriotic colors because their president is an Arab fellow named Gamal Aziz.

Anyway, back to Caesars.  For those of you who are not in the know, the Shadow Lounge is the hot new bar at Caesars where they have sexy dancers contorting and cavorting behind screens, up behind the bar.  It’s a great place.  My date (the man who sent me a gift in exchange for the hot link photos) was a little late, so I whiled away the time chatting with a New York City man next to me who was “freakin’ out” about the day’s events.  It transpired that he had supplied much of the World Trade Center with its electrical wiring when it was first built.  He didn’t want to sound opportunistic, he told me, but “they’re gonna need a lot of new wiring when they rebuild that sucker…”  Seriously though, he was very upset, so much so that he had not even enjoyed that morning’s golf victory, where he had won $50 from his buddies.  He was now on his way to the Olympic Garden topless club, where presumably he could smother his troubles between the man-made mounds of a nubile young stripper.

Well, after my date, which was enjoyable enough, I had arranged to meet a girlfriend at Studio 54 for EDEN Night (every Tuesday they have this lame Industry night for dancers and performers in Vegas… it really is the best night to go to that club).  I thought it was kinda inappropriate to go to a club in a time of national strife, but I couldn’t reach my friend by phone and didn’t want to stand her up.  Anyway, the club was PACKED!  Today’s youth gives not a whit for terrorism.  I myself ducked out after 20 minutes to go home and watch more news, because I CARE.

Ever since then, Vegas has been in limbo.  The airports were closed, so no one could leave… and no fresh blood could come in for me to prey on.  So I made very little money the last couple of nights.  In fact, tonight I made $11, pre-tax.  No one is in the mood for overpriced souvenir photos!  Last night I was lucky — I ran into a jovial Arab and his girlfriend who bought $100 worth of photos from me, so I did OK.  But things are so bad that even David Copperfield has canceled his shows.  So I’m blowing town for a few days, going home to lie low in Cal for a while.  It’s my mother’s birthday tomorrow, so I’ll just surprise her by showing up.  I expect to return to Vegas by Tuesday.  Hopefully by then the nation will have forgotten the thousands of lost lives and crushed babies and will be ready once again to buy my overpriced souvenir photos.

Before the national Crisis, all was well in Vegas Towne.  Last Friday night it sounded like the opening line to a joke:

Don Johnson, Patrick Swayze and Alice Cooper are all at this titty show…

only it was no joke!  Actually, there was sort of a punch line: Patrick Swayze was in the booth next to Alice Cooper, and at the end of the show everyone MOBBED Patrick Swayze, and left Alice Cooper out in the cold.  Serves him right!  When I had asked him if he’d like photos, before he could say “Yes, please!” his bitch piped up: “NOT TONIGHT…”  Oh, well.  I just thought it would have been a cool surprise for the guy who prints out my photos — he’s a hard-core, old-school stoner.

My social life has also been a real whirl.  I went to see one of my girlfriends perform at this open-mike comedy nite down the street from where I live — whooo-eee!  I have never seen an odder assortment!  The host of the club was the frizzy-haired owner of a local hairstyling salon who is also in a ZZ Top cover band.  Enough said there!  The comics themselves ranged from the unsightly (this big fat guy who came up to me once at Barnes & Noble back in January and asked me for a date — and he remembered me!!!!) to the horrific — this one cab driver whose jokes were all sadistic necrophilia-type sex jokes delivered in a scary, pre-Kalashnikov-massacre monotone!!!!!!

Then the next day I decided to make a break from the freaks and indulge in some down-home American football. I went to both Sunday and Monday night games at this sports bar with a couple of girlfriends, and I spent a total of like $40 on potato skins and chicken wings!!!  Oy.  My one girlfriend brought her 2 kids with us on Sunday, and the really amazing thing was they wasted $20 on that stupid machine where you manipulate this grabber-claw and try to snag stuffed animals and stuff.  You know what I’m talking about!  Anyway, these kids were amazing!!!  I have *NEVER* seen anyone get *anything* out of one of those machines, and they got 3 stuffed animals plus a Phoenix Suns hat!!  Wow.

Then, looking for some peace and quiet, I went to the good old public library.  Wrong!  As soon as I pulled into the parking lot I was all but run over by a truck containing an excited man and his toddler son — he said it was his first day in town and he was so excited to have found the library!  Then when I got inside, I began the looong process of browsing around, looking for interesting books — but every aisle I went down, this one guy would follow me!!!!  I could tell he was working up his courage to ask me out, so I grabbed the 3 nearest books (2 of which I had already read!!) and busted a move to the checkout.

I did get a lead on a hot new job, though.  A friend of mine who is Thai said she used to work in Japan at this bar where Japanese businessmen pay big bucks to buy you drinks.  It costs them like $100 to buy one bottle, of which you keep $50 and the mama-san (boss lady) gets $50.  So you just bullshit all night, talking to the businessmen and secretly pouring your drinks down into this bucket under the table so that they buy you more!  I asked her if prostitution was involved and she said absolutely not.  So I may just jet off to Tokyo one of these days… as you know my days as a camera girl are drawing to an end.   I already gave my 2 weeks’ notice.

I was thinking back on some of my more memorable nights in the camera biz, and the Tom Jones show came to mind.  This one night there was this drunken-ass lady who kept giving me kisses on the cheek and telling me “Tell your Mom that a lady named Phyllis from Chicago thinks you are a really classy girl!  Tell her she did a grrrreat job raising you!”  She bought $100 worth of photos from me, so I was trying to be nice, but while I was talking to her I felt someone kicking my leg.  I thought it was the other camera girl in the showroom trying to tease me, but when I turned around it was this cantankerous old bitch hitting me in the back of the knee with her cane!!!  I was like, “What do you want, Miss?”
“WHERE WERE YOU when Paul Anka was here the other night????  He came over and sat next to me and sang in front of the WHOLE CROWD!!!!”

I told her, “Well, I’m sorry but we’re not allowed in the showroom once the show starts and besides, I don’t work the Paul Anka show…” but this old bitch didn’t listen, she just wanted everyone in the vicinity to know that she was “good friends” with Paul Anka.  She buys tickets to ALL his shows, but she buys ’em back in Long Island.  Like I care!

But it’s bitches like that, that will make me really miss my job.  You just watch, in a month I’ll be sitting slaving away in front of some corporation’s PC, and I’ll be PINING away for the glamorous camera girl job I once had…

[END OF OLD ENTRY]

After this entry, I drove to California to visit my family, and then moved from Vegas back to the Bay Area. However, it was so BORING (no one in my family ever wanted to do anything), that I sooned bailed on that and decided to move to Hollywood.

But I found L.A. overwhelming, expensive and impossible to park my ginormous 18-and-a-half-foot-long Lincoln…so I crawled back to Vegas, to suckle on the neon teat for another TEN FREAKING YEARS. Wow!