Lollapolozza Piercer's Workbook. (Patreon)

We're trying to get the finishing touches on two new Better Safe than Ari interviews- with Didier Suarez and Sharrin Specter, respectively, for the newest BSTA collected interviews book (more information on that coming soon) and this section from Ari's conversation with Didier tied in perfectly with a photo I snapped at the 2019 Association of Professional Piercer's Body Piercing Archive exhibit on the life and career of Fakir Musafar.

I met Ghadi at the Lollapolozza tour in Orlando, 1992. Piercing at an outdoor music festival during the hottest month of Summer was an interesting choice. 

Ari - Do you have any idea how long he’d been piercing for at this point?

Didier - Not very long, probably a couple of years. Jef Saunders had reminded me that Gahdi was the piercer on the first Lollapalooza, or did the training for it. There was a woman who’s name I can’t remember, that was who he did it with, and ended up back in San Diego where he was renting a room in the back of a hair salon. We got moved to another hair salon and I told him hey, we’re telling people we’re the best in town - at this point, there was a piercer named Trish Curly who was working at a leather shop type spot in Hillcrest, and the Aaron I mentioned who was next door to a clothing store named Catwalk - it turned into the Claw. Down the street was a guy who sold bondage gear and was kind of freaky in some second-story one-room building, I think his name was Anthony. Arturo, who owns Church of Steel, was piercing out of a tattoo shop. Art had maybe been doing it a couple of years at this point. I was working part-time at a college bookstore and working with Gadhi. One day someone came in and told me about Art, and Art had been coming in to get stretched by Gadhi but hadn’t told us he was a piercer. A lot of it was more deeply rooted than Gadhi though - he was an LA guy who’s family had moved here. Because of the Fakir Intensives and who he wanted to be it was much more of that transcendent experience breathing technique type than the typical fetish-y stuff. I personally never took the Fakir seminars but I read the handbook all the time, and that was the way I was taught and still use it.