Sneak Peek: Ari interview Pat Pruitt (Patreon)

Our oral historian Ari Pimsler is back at it; he's just turned in a whopper featuring Patt Pruitt for the next issue of our Nodal Points zine; it's looking like its going to span around 26 pages once we get the edits, photos, etc taken care of. 

Page One:

Ari - Pat, was body piercing a part of your life before you started making jewelry, or specifically body jewelry?

Pat - No actually, it wasn’t. I actually started making jewelry quite young, I mean I was like 15 when I got my start. That’s when I learned traditional silversmithing from one of the silversmiths here in the village. It wasn’t until I got into college that I was exposed to the body piercing scene. Everything just happened right at that magical moment in time, like I got into college and I’m broke as heck because I’m a college student, so I wasn’t involved in the body piercing scene until the early 90s - like 90 or 91. I realized real quickly how expensive jewelry was at that time because it truly was expensive at that time, it was no joke. I was seeing it like hey, I can make this! I mean a lot of it was not that difficult, just rings and whatnot. So that’s how I got my start into body jewelry, not for my own personal habit, and then I just connected with people. That’s how I first met Allen (Falkner), he had Obscurities at the time - that was when his first version was where he was first piercing in a back room in a used or vintage furniture store (*Boomerang Vintage). I was like oh this is kind of interesting! Dallas also had Skin and Bones with Stace Maples. There weren’t that many studios at all, I don’t quite know who came first between those two (*Skin and Bones was first) but that was about it. But the studios found out I was making jewelry and I just made stuff for them, and then word got out around Texas and I started to make stuff for studios out in Austin and San Antonio all the way down to Corpus Christi and it just kind of evolved. I wasn’t thinking at the time “oh, this is going to become something!” I was just trying to make some money for college.

Ari - In college in Dallas what kind of piercings were you seeing at this time?

Pat - I was going to SMU, Southern Methodist University, and I don’t know if you know anything about that school but it was a very privileged school. I was there on a scholarship, I had a work study program, which was how I was able to afford tuition but I believe while I was there tuition was like twelve grand a semester, like ridiculous expensive for the time. I have no idea what it is today, surely a nightmare. But yeah, it was expensive and the students that went there were wealthy, they all had money, so a lot of what I saw was that wave of navel piercings. If someone had their tongue pierced that was pretty extreme for that school. So navels, nostrils, what we would consider vanilla today, your bread and butter piercings.

Ari - Not much changes. Earlobes and nostrils and navels still pay the bills in most areas! Did you proactively seek out these shows, or did they catch wind of you making jewelry and reached out to you?

Pat - I don’t recall - I think it was honestly a bit of both. It got to the point where I was trying to do the balance of work (or rather, a little hobby on the side) and school, so I think most of it was word of mouth because I really didn’t venture out around too far outside of Dallas. There was a really pivotal moment where I said ok, I’m going to go down this path of body jewelry - I met a buddy of mine named Brian Crone (spelling?), he was an engineer with Alcatell (spelling?) at the time, and he was a consultant in the telecommunications industry, I met him through other students that were part of the this work study program, this co-op program, and he kind of knew what I was doing at the time, kind of messing around this this, and he showed me this news article. It was a front page article in like the Wall Street Journal about body piercing, I don’t even remember what the article said! But that was the ah-ha moment, that was like oh this is going to be something, it’s not a fad, because I look back and none of us really knew what we were doing, right? We were just kind of winging it, I think aside from Allens shop, which wasn’t even a standalone shop, everyone was sort of existing in either an underground scene or a tattoo parlor. That was it as far as my knowledge.

Photo: Sourced from Patt's Instagram.