Hey, everybody, This is Life is a Gamble episode number three Wonder Hussey.
Before we start, just a couple of brief announcements. I always love
hearing from me from you. I love hearing from me too, but I
love hearing from you. And you can reach me at Life is a Gamble
pod at gmail dot com, or you can find me on Twitter at our
WM twenty one. Now here's the show. My guest today is the fabulous
Wonder Hussey, whose real name is Sarah Jane Woodall. And I came across
a Wonder Hussey in a very interesting way. I have a friend who's many
many years ago said to me you should interview Wonder Hussey, and he thought
your Yelp reviews were so well written. He told me to go look up
your Yelp reviews, which I did, and I also was thoroughly entertained by
them. Wonder Hussey is a writer, a creator and artist of many sorts.
Also, I remember you did a story. There is a book that
comes out every year. I think it's called a Writer's Las Vegas. One
year it was called Back to Where You Once Belonged, and you had a
story in there, which I also greatly appreciated. I think about when you
were a in the old days, if you went to see a show,
they had camera girls who went around and took your picture and sold new pictures.
Now everybody has their phone, so that that kind of died. Oh
you guys, they're still out there, are they really? Yeah? That
I can't believe that company is still in business. Wow, that is actually
amazing. But what I wanted to focus on today, this is a story
about people taking risks. And so after the camera job, you became a
nude model. Is that correct? Well? I did both at the same
time for quite a while, and then I found that I was making better
money and I enjoyed being a nude model more than being a camera girl.
So I quit being a camera girl. I'm focused on nude modeling full time.
And how did that first happen? Like, how did you hear about
it or find it? Well, I was already working as a freelance model,
mostly just to get headshots so that I could work trade shows and be
like a booth babe, you know, do promotional marketing. But this was
the recession of two thousand and eight. Let's go back in time to two
thousand and eight. Remember how terrible it was. Oh, I had an
underwater house. My mortgage was killing me. You know, I couldn't get
enough roommates to pay it, and so I had to turn to the dark
side. I used to go on Craigslist to find all my modeling gigs.
Oh my god. Back then, yeah, Soislist had different categories. You
know, pr marketing, you know events that. Well, they used to
have an adult category, which they don't have anymore because of some unfortunate murders.
But back then they had the adult category and I never checked that because
I was a nice gal. I just want to do trade show as well.
I was desperate one day before, I remember it just like it was
yesterday. I was sitting on the couch before I went into work as a
camera girl. I thought, I gotta make some more money. What can
I do? Wow, there's nothing in the gigs on Craigslist. Maybe I
should check the adult gigs. And so I did, and that's how I
got into Well, it's a long story, but that's basically how I got
into nude modeling. So for our audience who doesn't understand what this is,
this is not like doing pictures for Playboy. This is basically individuals who hire
you to pose for them, right exactly. So I'm I'm being a little
bit facetious when I say that I got on my work off Craigslist. I
got a lot of gigs off Craigslist when I was working as a booth model,
but for nude modeling, I actually used a modeling website. There's this
website called ModelMayhem dot com, and it's like a Facebook for models and photographers.
Because you don't, people don't realize there's a vast, vast, vast
amount of unfulfilled artists in this role. Okay, these guys that are doctors,
lawyers, engineers by day, well they always wanted to indulge their artistic
side. But you know, their parents wouldn't let them go to art school.
They had to go be a doctor, go be an engineer. Well,
they still have this unfulfilled artistic ambition, and so in their spare time
they like hiring models and creating what they feel to be beautiful works of art.
And so that was my audience on Model Mayhem. I had a profile.
You know, here's my name, here's what I do, Here's what
I charge. Hire me. If you're interested, I'm certainly not or wasn't
the best looking women in Las Vegas. There's plenty of beautiful women in Vegas,
and I'm the last I'm the last person who should be a model.
I always say I'm short, I'm built like a penguin, meaning that I
have a long torso and short legs. I'm flat chested, like I don't
have the physique of a model. But I have no tattoos, no breast
implants, and I have brass frigging balls. I'm not afraid to take people
out into the desert. And that was the thing that got me the most
work. Well, actually all three of those, the no tattoos, no
implants, and the fact that I was willing to take people out into the
desert because a lot of these guys want to photograph a beautiful art nude out
in a harsh desert landscape, but most models in Vegas are either too lazy
or too scared to go out into the middle of nowhere with a complete stranger.
Right. Well, I wasn't afraid. That was my m O.
I even had a little commercial I made and I posted it on YouTuber Vimeo.
Hey photographers, are you coming to Las Vegas? Have you always wanted
to shoot beautiful art nudes in the desert. Hi, I'm WONDERRESSI and for
five hundred dollars, I'll come pick you up at your hotel nine am.
I'll drive you around to three different beautiful desert locations and pose nude at each
one, and drop you back off at your hotel at five pm, eight
hour day. Five hundred dollars. And I did that over and over and
over. I once calculated how many strange men, and they were pretty much
exclusively men. How many strange men I took out to the middle of nowhere
and pose nude for? And it was over five hundred. Can you believe
it? Oh my god. But now, in the beginning, before you
got into marketing yourself like this, I mean, do you remember your very
first time? Well, I do the very first job. Yeah, I
do. Actually, the first nude photo shoot I did wasn't even for pay.
It was to prove a point to myself. I had just broken up
with a boyfriend who was very conservative, and so now I can you know,
I can be myself again. I'm free of this conservative yoke. I
can let my freak flag fly. And at that time I was modeling for
you know, headshots and stuff like that. Oh, I don't do any
dudes. I only do clothed well and I asked myself, well, if
I'm such an open minded free spirit, why won't I pose mood? So
I did a nude photo shoot just to prove a point to myself, for
no pay, with the photographer whose work I admired, and the pictures came
out really good. We went out to the desert outside Vegas under a freeway
overpass. It was not a glamorous location and I was kind of like,
what is this guy doing? But he was good. He understood light and
it was you know, shade filtered light under this over I don't know.
The pictures came out really good, and so I was able to use those
photos from that free shoot to promote myself and get paid work after that.
But okay, but it's one thing to go out with a guy that you
know and you've seen his work and you know he's legitimate. But what about
the first guy that was like off Craig's list or well there, but it
was a stranger, right, I mean right, the Craigslist thing that that
was a bad example. I went on Craigs. That's how I started fetish
modeling, which is sort of tied to nude modelling. But when it comes
to just talking about nude modeling, I didn't do a lot of nude modeling
off Craigslist. It was almost exclusively off Model Mayhem and so on Model Mayhem.
If somebody contacts you, it's just like Facebook. You get a message,
Hi, my name is Richard Munchkin and I'm a photographer based out of
you know, Pukeepsie, and i'd like to horror you. I'm working on
a coffee table book. There was working on a coffee table book, right,
well, I never saw one. Anyway, you can then now you
can go to their profile and look at their pictures and go, okay,
this guy's pretty good. And if you want, you know, they tag
the name of the model in the photos. So now you can click on
the model and go to heart profile and if you want, you could message
the model going, hey, you know, Richard Munchkin message me he wants
to do a photoshoop with me. I just want to check with you.
Was he okay to work with? And then you know, the model will
answer you, oh yeah, he was very nice. He's greater. Well,
I don't know, be careful working with him. You know, he
tried to grab my ass. Whatever. You can vet them more or less,
and if anything makes you feel uncomfortable, well you don't have to accept
the booking. So my first page shoot was on model Mayhem. This guy
I won't say more about other than his name was Bill and he was from
Massachusetts and he very nice guy. But man, I mean it was slightly
grim. I went to it. He was staying at Harrah's, which isn't
even a very nice hotel. This is before I got into the outdoor stuff.
So I go to his room at Harrah's and he's wearing a white undershirt
and you know, he's got a beer gut and it's just a dingy hotel
room. So here, okay, take this off, take that off.
I'm like, oh, man, I went to college. What is this
like? But you know I made I think I charged through one hundred and
fifty an hour for that shoot. For two hours, I made three hundred
bucks. I'm okay, Well I wasn't so bad, and so I did.
I shot in hotel rooms quite a bit. In fact, I often
say I've been in more Vegas hotel rooms than any hooker. But then I
grew to prefer shooting outdoors just because I felt I had more control over the
situation. I guess when I was shooting outdoors, because you know, people
go, oh, my gosh, weren't you scared to go out? You
know, take all these strange men out to the middle of the desert,
out to the middle of the door. Oh no, if you look at
it from their point of view, they were scared. They don't know where
I'm taking them. There's no cell signal. A lot of times it's super
hot, they have no idea where they are. They've got expensive camera gear
with him, They've got pockets full of cash with which they planned to pay
me. I could just as easily have taken them out somewhere and beat them
up and robbed them, you know, or had a posse out there waiting
for him. Then oftentimes when we got to the first location, the guy
would actually go, hey, hold on a minute, I need to text
my friends because they were worried about me. You know, I need to
let them know that I'm okay, Like they were just as scared as I
was. Believe it or not. Wow, Wow, I always tell people
flip the script like you, oh, a woman going out to the desert
by her. I found there was a weird, almost kind of power in
nakedness. So I would go, you know, I'm picked the guy up
at the hotel. Okay, we're going out. The first location we're gonna
go to is out by Lake Mead, So it's an hour long drive.
We drive for an hour or chit chat and get to know each other.
And I'm wearing like a little dress. I would always wear like a very
loose, baggy dress because I wear tight clothing. Well that's going to leave
marks on your skin, right, like from the elastic. And so then
when you take your clothes off, well, now he's got marks that he's
got a photoshop out, Like that's not professional. So I always wearing this
baggy dress. So we would get to the first location and okay, here
we are, get out of the car, he gets all his gear out.
We walk hike back to a place where no one can see us.
And then I would just whip off my dress. I mean it wasn't like
I was gonna coil flip out of it all sexy. No, I just
whip it off. And so like the guy would be bent over getting his
camera out of his bag or something, and then he would stand up and
I'd be standing there buck naked, and I mean a lot of times he
was visibly taken aback, like almost would off or afraid, and almost felt
like I was wearing this weird kind of force field, Like I almost always
felt like I had the upper hand. When I was shooting outdoors. Now
in a hotel room, I wasn't much different, But I don't know.
I guess I don't know why. I just preferred being outdoors because I like
the outdoors. I guess, yeah, wow, that's yeah, not what
I would have expected. But that's really interesting. None of this is anybody
would expect, Okay. I mean when you say, oh, nude modeling,
it just sounds so seed And I'm not gonna lie. Many of the
shoots I did, like that first one, I described a hair as it
was borderline ceed and depressing, but it's really you know, there's there are
hundreds of women in the country today that are making a full time living as
a freelance art nude model like I did. It's a totally legitimate way to
make a living. So just on the technical side, of this. You're
going out to the desert and it's hot and you're nude like, and you're
in the desert. I mean, it's rocks and dirt, and aren't your
feet burning up in some of these situations, I mean, are you It
sounds like much of this would be very uncomfortable. Well it was. None
of it was comfortable. Like. It was a miserable, miserable job.
And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and I wouldn't go back to I've
been retired for about four or five years now. I wouldn't go back to
it. But no, I mean, I'm in control of my own schedule,
so if it's your I don't have to book gigs. I mean I
didn't a ton of shoots in December January because it was too cold, And
I didn't book very many gigs in June, July, August because it was
too hot. Now, occasionally there would be a guy who, oh,
the heat doesn't bother me, and I actually, like, I actually enjoyed
those kind of shoots because, Okay, the guy says the heat doesn't bother
him, but he's not from around here. When we get out there,
he's gonna see how hot it is, He's gonna get tired after a couple
hours, and I'm gonna get paid for the whole day. So that actually
worked out in my favor for the most part. And on the one I'm
naked, you know, so he's the guy wearing clothes and sweating like,
you know, I'd be more worried about your feet. Well, I would
wear shoes until I got to wherever it was that they wanted me to pose,
an unfortunately a fair amount of the time they wanted me to wear high
heels, which I think is really silly, Like if you're up artistic nude
in the desert, why would you wear high heels or cowboy boots. But
I'm here to tell you I wore high heels or cowboy boots. And at
least fifty percent of these pictures, and these guys would all have the same
idea as too, Like they'd go, oh, I've got a really funny
idea for a shot. How about if we have you stand at the out
of the highway, lonely desert highway, just wearing high heels, nothing else
and hitchhiking. Oh, what a fun idea. Meanwhile, I did that
same exact shot with like fiftys. You know, I think Madonna did that
shot in her in her book, in her Sex. Yeah, it sex,
except it wasn't in the middle of the desert. I think it was
like Miami or something. Right. Well, you know there's that one too.
I've been listen, I've been naked hitchhiking in a bunch of different places.
It's a it's a it's a common trope, let's just say. And
so that was probably the hardest part of the job, in a weird way.
Was just suffering fools, if you know what I mean. Like,
suffering fools is a huge part of being a model. You don't have to
be the most beautiful girl, you don't have to have the best figure,
but you have to be able to suffer fools gladly when they show you,
Oh look at this picture I just took. Look how great it came out.
Oh wow, that's great, even though it's overexposed, underexposed, out
of focus, terrible composition, like cheesy. But you have to be an
ego stroker par excellence. And that was the thing that I got tired of
more than anything. Man. After a while, I just wanted to be
honest to go. No, your work is corny, you have zero talent.
You're an idiot. Give me your money and get the hell out of
here. You know you told me once that you had a this was a
good sound insane that you had a photographer who was blind. Oh I did.
He was legally blind. Well, I'm impressed that you remember this.
This guy. It's so bizarre, right. Can you forget guy from Australia
who was legally blind, so he had I guess tunnel vision to where he
could see, but not well enough to drive or do any number of things.
I don't know. He could see well enough, I guess, I
mean these cameras. Look, we've all seen that famous selfie that the monkey
took of itself on National Geographic. Okay, a monkey, you can take
a photo. Let's just put it that way. This poor blind guy,
I mean, he saw well enough. But I set up the whole thing.
I took him to the location, I did the pose, I held
up the piece of fabric whatever, and all he really had to do is
click the shutter. I don't mean to disparage that guycause he was really nice
and it ended up really opening up his world. Like from there he went
back to Australia and he joined Model Mayhem and he met all these other models
and photographers and he got this whole network of friends and it was very creatively
fulfilling for him. So I was actually really happy to have helped him out.
There. You go, art therapy, Yes, modeling is therapy.
So you mentioned that you moved into kink. How did that happen? Well,
sort of around the same time as I started new modeling, I needed
to pay my bills, my mortgage, and you know, I started the
nude shoots. But then I also thought, okay, let me check this
adult gig section on Craigslis. Well that's where all this fetish stuff came up,
and so I went, oh, okay, So with a lot of
fetish modeling, you don't have to be naked. You can be wearing a
bikini or regular clothes. I mean, you could be wearing fully clothed and
just drinking a root beer and burping and they'll pay you. Like weird stuff
like overeating donuts or spitting into a wine glass, like just weird stuff.
Well, what's the harm in that? I'll do that. And man,
I did a lot of fetish modeling couldn't current with my nude modeling. I
mean I was a full time freelance model. I would do nude modeling,
I would do fetish modeling. I would also do trade shows. I would
hand out flyers. Whatever you wanted to hire me for based on my looks,
I would do it. I didn't know that fetish went into these I
didn't know that was a fetish spitting into wineglasses or we don't have time in
this podcast, But boy, there's a fetish for everything. I've been some
very very weird days. So what is the most bizarre fetish that they asked
you to do? I'm glad you asked Come to find out, there's a
big fetish among men of a certain age. I guess for women blowing up
like blueberries. Okay, remember Willie Wonk. Yeah. Way, So there
was a segment demographic of guys who were just hitting puberty right when they saw
that scene and it did something to them. So there was this there's a
woman in Vegas, I think she still does it. She exclusively does what
she calls inflation videos. So you go over there and she has like the
very loosely scripted scene like the one that I did. I was a scientist
trying to grow the world's biggest blueberry from Monsanto, and I was going to
win the Nobel Prize if I could perfect this recipe. So I'm wearing a
lab coat, my hairs up, I got glasses on, and I have
this test tube full of the serum. And then I accidentally drop. Oh
no, a tiny bit of the serum got on my hand. Oh well,
just one drop, couldn't matter. But then all of a sudden,
my face are blue. I start swelling up really really big, bigger and
bigger. Next thing, you know, the buttons on my lab coat are
popping up. Oh no, I think like there's certain things you're supposed to
talk about, like oh gosh, I can feel the juice is swishing around
under my skin. My skin feels so taught. I feel like I'm going
to burst, like these certain keywords. The woman who did the she would
tell you like, okay, make sure you talk about how your skin is
gonna burst. But the thing the video that I did, these inflatable suits
are very expensive. There are these latex they're Japanese Latex inflatable suits. And
I don't don't ask me why they come in Japan, but they do anyway,
they're like eight hundred bucks, so she would reuse the suit as manytimes
she could. Well, by the time they made my video, the suit
was on its last legs and so her assistant accidentally overinflated it and I actually
exploded, which is what every fetishist really wants to see, the blueberry actually
blow up, but obviously they don't do that actually be very expensive, Well
in this video, it did happen, and so she was able to charge
more for that video, and it ended up being one of her best selling
videos of all time. Amazing, just amazing things you never things I never
would have thought of, but hey, whatever gives somebody a pleasure as long
as it doesn't hurt anybody else than Yeah, everything was consensual, and with
the fetish I thought this was interesting. With nude modeling, everybody who hired
me was a man. I think one time a couple hired me, but
so obviously the husband was really behind it. Basically all men hiring me with
fetish. All these fetish websites, most of them were run by women,
and so obviously the end user, the guy who's buying the clips, it's
a guy, but women were directing, shooting, starring in all these sense.
It was just kind of like all us girls gooping around wearing this blueberry
soon doing this blueberry thing, Like, oh it was it was actually kind
of fun. Yeah, it sounds like it. I mean, you're like
making a little movie or whatever. So yeah, and that's what I enjoyed
about it. She would have a very loose script, like with the Monsanto
blueberry thing. I came up with all those details. All she told me
was, Okay, you're a scientist and you're trying to make the world's biggest
blueberry. Well I'm a dramatic person, so and all of a sudden,
Oh, I'm working from Monsanto and I'm going to win the Nobel Proze.
And I like ad libbing dialogue and making weird stuff up. So it was
a lot of fun for me. So you did not think of these things
as risky or big gambles. Is there anything in your life where you did
think of it as risky or a big gamble? Well, yeah, some
of these shoots. To be honest, you know, I was always pretty
vanilla. I mean, even with nude modeling. We used to say,
like, you know, on your profile, you could say what you were
comfortable doing, what kinds of pictures you were comfortable shooting, And I would
always say, I'm comfortable shooting playboy style nudes, which means your legs,
your knees are together, you're not spreading it like that's penthouse or hustler stuff.
And then with fetish kind of the same thing, like, oh,
I don't really do anything like explicit, but every now and then somebody would
hire me for something that I really didn't feel comfortable with. A matter of
fact, Oh, you just reminded me. One of the very first fetish
gigs I did was on Craigslist and it was a guy who was doing a
tickle fetish video. Okay, there's a fetish for women being tickled, and
I was new to it, but I thought, okay, I have to
dress up like he said, to wear business clothes or somebody that he's going
to tie me up and tickle me. Okay, So I go to the
Excalibur, which set the excalibur, I go up to his room, knock
on the door, guy opened, Hey, Hi, come on in.
Okay, So here's the setup. The script for this is, I'm trying
I'm a guy who invented a game, and I'm trying to sell you this
game, and you're the casino executive, and you don't want to buy my
game. And so then I chloroform you, and I tie you up and
tickle you until finally you say, okay, okay, I'll buy your game.
Okay, sure sounds good. So he tied me up and chloroform you.
Now I don't know if this guy is really gonna chloroform you know,
Like this guy actually tied me up and put a rag on my face.
Now, it was just a wash cloth, there was nothing on it,
and everything went fine, but that talk about a gamble man, it could
have gone yeah, right, I mean, and he really tied you up.
You were actually tied up, not just like fake tied up. Oh
gosh, I don't remember, but I'm thinked so yeah. I mean,
because they want it to look believable for the camera. I mean, probably
he didn't tie me up so tight that it hurt. Although, gosh,
another guy that I shot with a number of times did. I mean,
he tied you up real tight, and his thing was you were the babysitter
and he was little Johnny, and so little Johnny, you know, your
little Johnny's parents go out for the night. And okay, little Johnny,
what do you want to do. Let's play cops and robbers. I'll be
the robber, you'll be the cops. I'm gonna tie you up. Well,
okay, Johnny, but don't tie me too tight. Oh I won't
babysitter. Well, then guess what. He would tie you up a real
tie, and then he would just make fun of you and tease you,
and you would struggle around trying to get loose. And yeah, did you
ever did you ever have customer where you actually felt in danger? No?
And I do have a handgun, and so I didn't. I wasn't in
the habit of taking it with me on these photoshoots. But there were two
times when I did bring my gun, just because I was kind of weird
about weird at out about the situation. And both of those happened to be
off of Craigslist. Not Model Mayhem. Okay, model Mayhem. I felt
more secure because, like I said, I could vet resources Craigslist. You
don't know, I was just some guy on Craigslist. Well, I was
desperate, I needed money whatever, so I took these Craigslist bookings and two
of them I felt weird enough about that I brought my gun and both of
those times turned out to be just fine. I felt silly, and of
course I didn't tell the guy I had a gun with me. But that
was it. Two out of over five hundred. Wow, So what are
you doing now? You got out of this four years ago, five years
ago? What are you? What are you doing now? Well, so
with modeling, I was always out in the desert, right like, trying
to find cool new desert places to pose a nude because these guys they always
want to shoot you an old abandoned buildings or old abandon factories or you know
whatever. So I'm always out scouting around and trying to I find new a
band in places. Well, eventually I got more interested in scouting around the
abandoned places, and I started filming videos of that and putting them on YouTube,
And next thing you know, people started following me on YouTube, and
well, by gum, I got into YouTube being and now I have a
YouTube channel where I and the irony of all this is my YouTube videos are
completely PG or G even I'm totally clothed, and I make ten times as
much money as I did modeling naked. Really wow about that? Yeah,
so I have seen some of this. You go explore ghost towns and abandoned
places, and you're basically a desert rat. Basically. People seem to really
enjoy it. I have people from all over the world watching. Yeah,
all right, And you're also on Instagram? And are you doing anything?
Do you have any other creative outlets? Are you writing? Unfortunately, I
don't have time to write anywhere, and I enjoy writing quite a bit,
but youtubing takes up so much of my time. I write scripts for my
videos and that's about all I write anymore, unfortunately. Yeah. All right,
Well, for our listeners, go check out wonder Hussey. You can
find her on YouTube and on Instagram and I'll put links in the show notes.
And what about Yelp? Are you still writing any Yelp reviews? I
mean, I feel like Yelp is so rigged there's no point. I write
Google reviews every now and then, but you know, only when it's warranted.
Yeah, all right, Well, thank you so much for doing this.
I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's nice to get that off
my chest. Well that's it for today's show. If you like the show
and want to support the show. The best thing you can do is leave
a review wherever it is that you get this podcast. I really appreciate it,
and also tell a friend sorry, I have no recommended for you this
week. I didn't find anything that I thought was really worth recommending. So
have a good week and I'll see you next time.