The Privilege of Living

Aging fearlessly takes on a different meaning when you know people who never had the opportunity to age at all.

I’m thinking of my friend, Susan Walsh, a warm, funny, brilliant person who was also a talented writer, a mother and a sex worker. This month, marks thirty years since she first vanished.

Susan went missing on July 16^th, 1996, from her house in Nutley, N.J. She was 36 years old. Sporting bleach blonde hair, blue eyes, ruddy skin, a thin frame, and a sweet smile she could put anyone and everyone at ease. That was one of her gifts. Outside of the Jersey go-go bars, Susan preferred to dress simply in black T-shirts and jeans.

Her ambitions as a writer were big and she pursued them even though she was a single mother and didn’t have much help financially from the father of her child. Susan got her son into a gifted school and proceeded to pay for it by dancing in Jersey go-go bars. She was pursuing an MFA at NYU and also had a gig at the Village Voice working with acclaimed journalist James Ridgeway. Besides working on articles with him, she researched a book he wrote, that Sylvia Plachy did the photographs for called Red Light.

Red Light profiled sex workers in New York in the Nineties and is described by Publisher’s Weekly as “strenuously non-judgemental.” It includes interviews with people who make a living from commodifying sex. Their candid descriptions of what they do are more compelling than any intellectual could try to articulate. Susan helped Jim Ridgeway by infiltrating that world and because of who she was, Susan was able to get people to talk to her. Jim was not. I know he was forever grateful for her contribution. Jim passed in 2021.

I was also a writer working in Jersey go-go. I turned my experiences into a play, True Confessions of a Go-Go Girl.This is how Susan and I met. She came to see the play because she wanted to include me in Red Light. We became fast friends and I asked her to be in my documentary Stripped.

Stripped was about how difficult it was for women who danced for dollars to quit. I didn’t know that when I first started making the film, but that’s what it turned into. When I discovered what a bright light Susan was, I wanted to include her.

For the doc shoot, Susan sat at a table with four other women who worked as dancers and admitted she had just lost her sobriety after twelve years. During that interview, Susan did not seem well. She was gaunt; her voice was gravelly; and her energy was dark. She said the dancing was just getting to be too much for her. At some point, her beeper went off (1996) and she said it was her stalker. I later learned she had a restraining order out on this person, and he had threatened her life. But she also felt imperiled by the Russian mafia after writing an article about sex trafficking in the Village Voice. Then, she discussed her ties to the Italian mafia, and I later found out she was involved with members of a dangerous biker gang. Not to mention the vampires. I’m not even going to get into the vampires. This is all to say Susan seemed to thrive on putting herself in dangerous situations. At the time, so did I.

The point of this is – besides honoring who Susan Walsh was and who Susan was to me - is that she never got to experience aging past 36 years old. Knowing that makes a lot of the things I worry about inconsequential.

Susan’s body was never found, and it has continued to be an unsolved mystery to this day. The fact that she was a sex worker most likely curbed a real investigation right away. Yes, the police have since combed over things, but the saying “too little too late” really applies here. I feel for her son and the people she left behind. Everyone who has known her has been deeply affected and it’s one of those things most people don’t think about when they think about aging.

The alternative is not aging.

Focusing on gratitude saves me from fearing aging. Remembering Susan and others in my life who I wish were still with us, helps me to remember the privilege of living.

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Check out Jill’s inspiring interview on the FILTHY MILFS Podcast, episode, TEN ROUNDS WITH A GO GO DANCER. And in case you haven’t heard, WE WON THE WOMEN PODCASTERS AWARDFOR BEST COMEDY!!! You can see our acceptance speech here. Woo hoo!!!

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