When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire. ~ Angelina Jolie

It’s been a really lousy week and I’ve just recently moved so I was cleaning up some things today when I found this image. It made me immediately smile. So tonight I thought I’d tell the story of my vampire dam.

It was my first or second year in the dust, those early years run together. I was bartending in camp at the Nowhere Bar. It was a typical night on the Playa with the normal, if I can use that term, cast of Burning Man characters. It was getting late and three exquisitely dressed people came into the bar, a man and two beautiful women. The man came to the bar and got them drinks. I got busy and didn’t pay much attention to them for a bit when I felt someone looking at me, I turned and she was staring at me. She crooked her finger in a come here motion and I thought, what the hell. As I walked over she stood and offered me her chair, I declined and she stared deeply into my eyes as she reached down and took my hand, “take my chair,” she said directly, so I sat down. She straddled my lap and sat down facing me. We began to talk, quietly but very intensely and the entire time our eyes were locked on each others. At one point she leaned in and kissed me, slowly but incredibly erotically. We continued kissing for a time when she slid around and sunk her fangs into my neck. It was one of the most amazing, shocking and confusing moments of my life.

She came up after a minute, smiled and said, “you’ll always be mine now.” The she stood, kissed me sweetly and left. At that moment I realized her friends were already gone and I wondered how much time had passed, there was almost no one left in the bar. One of my campmates came over and said, “what the hell was that?” I sat there relatively stunned and told them that I think I just met a vampire. At this time Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a pretty popular TV show and one of the theme camps at Burning Man was called Spike’s Place. The camp was effectively a vampier camp that ran a bar. I didn’t make it to Spike’s that year but always wondered if she was part of that camp.

The next year on the playa I was having an amazing night. There was a camp that I was destined to interact with, It was a pizza delivery camp whose name I’m drawing a blank on and can’t track down. Their gig was that they basically made pizzas and randomly delivered them to people on the playa. So we were having a great night and Bubbles and I were walking down the Esplanade and I was ranting about how ridiculous it was that someone who loved pizza as much as I did, had never gotten one of these random pizzas delivered to me. About a minute later a guy tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “did you order a pizza?” We call it playa magic, when really incomprehensible and magical things happen at Burning Man. Even more amazing it was a pepperoni and mushroom pizza, my go to pizza and it was magnificent. So Bubbles and I chowed down that entire pizza in minutes. I couldn’t imagine the night getting any better and we were wondering near Center Camp when heard music and wondered toward it. We’d wondered our way to Spike’s Place.

We walked into the bar and looked around a little bit, got a drink and I had a really weird feeling. I spun around and there she was, my dam, five feet behind me, staring at me, “what took you so long, I’ve been calling you all night, I told you, you were mine” Bubbles knew the story and asked if that was the vampire from last year, I said yes. Then I said goodnight to Bubbles, because my dam wasn’t wrong and that night I was hers.

That memory is what brought me such a smile when I found that picture tonight. Hope you’re having happy memories as well my friends. ~ Rev Kane