Memories of SaRenna

I came of age just as the big-boobed model hit its peak phase. Drew Carey was a mainstay at the NYC Scores club. Daytime talk shows were having dancers like Wendy Whoppers and Lisa Lipps on to talk about their plastic surgeries and face the audience's confusion, scorn, and appreciation. And Tawny Peaks was being sued by a man claiming her massive swinging hangers gave him whiplash during a lap dance.  

The models of this era were literally built differently. Mountains of silicone, often requiring at least two rounds of surgery, teased hair, almost cartoonish hip-to-bust ratios, along with work ethics that would leave most crying, exhausted, and curled up into a ball. A work ethic that came less from working the grind and more from the passion of the art, because most of these models were also dancers.

This meant they were fit and toned and also understood how movement and posing could create a mood and cultivate sensations within the viewer. You didn’t become a big-bust model to make it rich. It was too much work for women looking for a quick buck. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few, but they quickly faded. 

To be a successful model, you had to have the thirst. Not thirst in the modern sense, though that likely helped. Thirst for the craft. It wasn’t the photo shoots that made money; it was the dancing. And you couldn’t make much money if you had a bad attitude, treated fans poorly, or merely walked around on the stage looking bored. You had to put on a show! (Insert jazz hands here.) Despite what people may think, many of the women who get breast implants are not doing it for male validation or even because of internal misogyny.

Summer Cummings spent almost a decade in a woman-loving relationship with another busty legend, Skye Blue. Eventually, they transitioned from simple girl/girl videos to extreme bondage and left an indelible mark on the world of erotic art. The world is so much more interesting than what people hate sex and themselves have told you.

Among all of these legends, these lovely buxom vixens, these well-knockered broads, these titans of pneumatic eroticism was SaRenna Lee. A blonde stacked southern belle with a million-watt smile, eyes that twinkled with mischief and a touch of naivete. SaRenna sported a set of bolt-ons that had their own gravitational pull. Anyone who saw SaRenna could not look away and never forget her. 

It’s a very vivid memory I have; the first time I saw her. I was in the Circle K by my house. On my way home from work, covered in grease and sweat, and trying to figure my shit out as I entered so-called adulthood, and needing some Coke and Twizzlers. But as I took my armful of late-night snacks to the counter, I saw them.

Those eyes from behind the counter. I saw her, dead center among a buffet of models with knockers bigger than their head. I was old enough to buy those filthy magazines now. Magazines I had only heard of on forums and from Howard Stern's show on E!. Magazines like Score, Gentlemen, Cheri, D-Cup, Jugs, and others had lived in my mind rent-free, fueling my teenage and young-adult fantasies.

I had discovered Dani Ashe a year or so prior. (That was another revelation, no less primal.) From Dani, I discovered a whole category of women, ones I was told didn’t exist. Understand, no one pulled me aside, sat me down, and literally said those words. However, the idea was implied from all around me. Society as a whole had made the implication very clear: a certain type of woman was desirable, attractive, and "big" didn't mean "BIG". Only weirdos and perverts desired such women.

While I may have been a pervert, find me a nineteen-year-old who isn't, but I wasn't THAT weird. It wasn't that I wasn't attracted to "normal" women. But I had always felt as if there was something missing. Danni opened my eyes but SaRenna exploded my world.

Women built like SaRenna and others existed on the margins of society. They were verboten. They were bimbos in all things but names, except bimbos weren't viewed with the same disdain and mockery as the big-bust models of the era.

But they did exist. They weren't just fantasies concocted by an overactive youthful imagination relying too much on cartoon logic. Women like SaRenna made me feel sane, made me realize that the things I was drawn to weren’t wrong or taboo. They were simply people who had seized control and made themselves in their own image. An idea that was intoxicating to a college dropout, living in his parents' basement, working a dead-end job that paid minimum wage, and wondering what I'm supposed to do.

Yet, despite my amateur knowledge of big-bust models, I hadn’t seen or heard of the blonde siren SaRenna Lee until I saw her that stormy night in the Circle K. Her eyes peered at me from behind the old clerk, her cherubic face above the plastic with a giant black box censoring out the “offensive” parts of her body.

It’s the eyes I remember the most. Those dark blue eyes, mesmerizing and mysterious, like something you’d expect to see peering out from a Hitchcock film. For all the Marilyn Monroe comparisons, all justified, for me, SaRenna always had a Kim Novak aura about her. Some of the Marilyn comparisons come from SaRenna herself. An early stage name for her was SaRenna Lee Norma Jean. But like Novak, SaRenna exhibited a raw sense of desire and sexuality with just a look.

SaRenna was enigmatic, impossible to know, but somehow as warm and welcoming as the girl next door. The contradictions snake around each other to create one of the most compelling models of the era.

The old man behind the counter, tired and anxious, asked me if I wanted a magazine. He could see me staring, transfixed by SaRenna’s sapphire peepers. His eyes told me he, too, was wrestling with much of the same existential issues I was. I nervously asked for a copy of Score. My voice may have even cracked. I know for sure I stammered. 

The old man grabbed the magazine and gave it to me. I gasped. The name alone conjured up a kind of altered reality, SaRenna Lee. A deeply Southern name mixed with her Marilyn Monroe looks, Kim Novak-eroticism, though with a couple of gargantuan differences. My first look at SaRenna’s face up close left me speechless. Her oval face with that short curly hair, tomboyish, classical, and intoxicating. 

The story behind her short locks stems from an attempt to bleach her roots that went disastrously wrong. Hired, less for her big melons, and more for her big 80s Vixen-style hairdo, she talked her way into the photoshoot, going on with her new hairstyle. It would go on to be one of her defining features. Every massively racked model of that era had long, teased, curly hair. But only SaRenna had the peroxide bob of unruly curls. 

But the thing I still remember about her, aside from those massive rib-cushions, is her eyes. Eyes that peered up from the glossy magazine cover that seemed to promise me something that, just for a brief time, the world didn’t have to make sense. I paid the man and raced home-literally. I didn’t have a car, and where I lived, public transit was nonexistent. Plus, again, it was raining. 

So, with SaRenna tucked tightly against my chest, I ran home in the rain. Eager to get out of the rain but more eager to see SaRenna again. Before I pulled the magazine out of the cover, I had known the term "erotic" meant. But seeing SaRenna in all her glossy glory, I finally understood the term.

Erotic meant more than arousal. It was a feeling culled from deep within you, a connection, an embodiment of desire and yearning. Erotic was a feeling so strong that the simple word almost didn't seem to be enough.

The big bust boom of the 90s, contrary to Playboy and Penthouse, or even the Glamour Pinup era that would come after, was almost downright proletarian. I can not stress enough how these ladies weren’t just models; they were dancers. Meaning they spent their time on the road, traveling town to town, building a fanbase not through site clicks, but by performing and gladhanding. Some of the models also did hardcore.  

There were no swanky parties at the Playboy Manor nor were they ever lauded by intellectual elites as their publisher fought for freedom of expression ala Larry Flynt. The models of “Score”, “Gents” and others were nomadic artists, constantly on the go. 

In other words, there were easier and better ways to make money. 

They also didn't get the cultural cache that models who did Playboy and others. Sarenna and others were considered "too big" or "too sexual". The real difference between the big-bust models of this era is how they scrubbed away the thin veneer of "tastefulness" and indulged unabashedly in what they were doing. They were erotic performers. Sex, they were selling sex.

It's why their photoshoots were usually all function and very little form. The sets and outfits were often cheap and ill-fitting. Though the latter was often part of the titillating charm. The backdrops were often muslin backdrops with a couple of pieces of furniture to suggest a room or setting. 

The draw wasn't respectability, it was the knockers. Except that’s untrue. It wasn't just the gazongas because every man had his favorite model. I loved SaRenna Lee, Tiffany Towers, Wendy Whoppers, Lisa Lee, and Summer Cummings. (Pandora Peaks loomed large in my mind, but she always seemed separate, perhaps because of her iconic status. She is one of the few titanic bust models to come close to going mainstream.) 

Of course, we were there for the ginormous silicone wobbly hooters. But any woman can pay a plastic surgeon. But few can pose in a way that imprints upon your consciousness. Like movie stars, models have to have an indefatigable quality, something that leaps off the page. This is doubly true for niche forms of erotic art.

Of all the models, SaRenna Lee felt like an avatar of poetic realism. A genre of film defined by the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert as “making the everyday mysterious”. Boy, does that sum up SaRenna. The girl next door, with exaggerated curves, down-home demeanor, and yet, was a fantasy come to life. When you look at a picture of SaRenna laughing, you can hear the laughter. 

When I finally saw SaRenna on VHS and heard her laugh, I was amazed at how it sounded exactly like the laugh in my head. When you looked at SaRenna in her photoshoots, honestly, you were looking at her. SaRenna Lee wasn't a character she played; it was who she was. Yes, she was using gender as a performance but in such a way as to reveal herself, to express her very being.

She took the notion of womanhood to extremes and didn't feel the need to hide away or be shy. She refused to be demure. Seeing her move, the athleticism as well as the aesthetic of her very being left me spellbound. 

So much of the mystery surrounding SaRenna, it turns out, didn’t come from SaRenna but from the publicity drummed up by the magazines. Bra sizes were often used as blurbs to really push the extravagance of the sizes. Except these sizes were often inflated to make the already larger-than-average ladies seem even larger than life.  

SaRenna was sometimes billed as an 88 GGG, an absolutely insane bra size, by any measure. She was in reality a 34H, which is still nothing to sneeze at. The big bust magazines were like carnival barkers using Barnum-esque methods to get people to pick up the latest issue. It worked, but it also added to the idea of othering women like SaRenna.

The unfortunate side effect were the models were treated like freak shows. Daytime talk shows would have on models like Chelsea Charms so the audience could gawk, jeer, and gin up business for when Chelsea came to a strip-joint near you. To an extent, the models leaned into it, but anyone who looks at these models and sees the hours of work they put into their shows understands these women aren’t freaks.  

It was SaRenna's choice to get implants. She got them and kept them even after she retired for eighteen years. Some women suffer from body dysmorphia, yes. But some women just want big breasts. The reason why so many people jump to these conclusions is that they cannot fathom why someone would get the surgery, and so supplant their lack of empathy and imagination with moralism. Far from a freak, she was an artist who used her body as a canvas to express herself and her desires. A licensed racer, SaRenna was more than her ample bra-busting breasts. She tackled life with a zeal and passion that most people only wish they could muster.

She retired once but came back again before retiring a second time. SaRenna loved being a dancer and was proud of her career and measurements. She loved racing cars. She loved her friends, and she loved her fans. But on April 4, she died in her sleep. She was 55. SaRenna Lee was more than fantasy, she was an artist, and a dreamer, and the world has too few of those not to mourn the loss of one the likes of SaRenna Lee.