Who is Lady~A?
No relation to Gaga. I had my moniker before she got famous, I’m afraid. Most people know me as Alex Savage, the wife of dark artist & designer Chad Savage of Sinister Visions inc., but while he is busy pounding away at the Halloween industry his little wifey lurks in the dark and meets all kinds of Children of the Night while promoting and planning the next gig she’ll attend in between an artist husband, a daughter, three dogs, travel, writing and guitar sessions.
It all started 20 years ago in that sultry city of New Orleans. I went to an Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat Fan Club Coven Party, the third one they ever held, in fact, in 1991. Chad was there too – that’s where we first met. I’d been in the Goth scene since I was 15 and was hooked on vampires after reading that classic tale of Louis and Lestat. Getting to go to New Orleans was somewhat of a dream and my lost boy Mister Savage gave me the ways and means.
I went to the Coven Party every year after that until I saved enough money to move to New Orleans in 1995 to become another lost soul. The mid-nineties was the height of the vampire scene in New Orleans and most other cities, too. It was a great place to be and I was there just at the right time. Bands like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson were just like any of us, hanging out at the bar looking for some kind of otherworldly inspiration in a city that time and the rest of the world seemed to have forgotten. You couldn’t walk the Quarter without bumping into someone famous in the alternative music scene and no one cared who they were. No one bothered them and that’s just the way they liked it.
My vampire enthusiasm landed me working for Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat Fan Club (ARVLFC) and I was on staff for the famous Memnoch Ball of 1995. I loved it there, but sometimes good things come to end. In 1997 I moved away because of an ex-boyfriend and for a while made myself forget New Orleans. I bounced around Tennessee and San Jose, California and then moved to Chicago in 1999 and married that Savage guy I had met in New Orleans ten years prior. I know, quite the love story.
The ARVLFC disbanded in 2000 and then re-established itself as something smaller a few years later, then Katrina came and threatened to smash it again. However, you can’t keep a good vampire down for long so the fan club and the parties came back stronger in 2006. I was there the year after Katrina and saw that especially because of that bitch of a hurricane that the people of New Orleans were even more determined to get their city and their culture back. I signed on once again to be the head of their marketing design and promotions division along with Mister Savage who launched the website which would connect everyone back to New Orleans and those famous vampire parties. We created a design and an aesthetic that captured the old imagination of what the vampire scene used to be and we got our audience back. Even though Anne Rice herself moved away from New Orleans and no longer attended, we catered to the new vampire literary genre and had guests like Charlaine Harris, Laurell K. Hamilton, Sherrilyn Kenyon and Gabrielle Faust.
In 2007, Father Sebastiaan of Endless Night, NYC came back to New Orleans (after being lambasted by Katrina as well) and approached me to cross-promote events with the ARVLFC in order to create a unique vampire weekend experience in New Orleans that no one had ever seen before. We’ve been working together ever since to make the Endless Night Vampire Ball an experience for all denizens of the dark while other parties have come and gone or fell down by the wayside, Endless Night has gone global in search of something more.
