Piercing: "El Presidente" Jef Saunders
"EL PRESIDENTE"
JEF SAUNDERS
Interview: Sean Dowdell
Sean Dowdell: Why did you want to learn to do body piercing?
Jef Saunders: This is kind of a long story, but I’ll be as brief as I can be. I
graduated high school in small town Connecticut in 1996. There was very little
going on in the way of body piercing where I was, but a few piercings had
become popular in the punk/hardcore scene by then. My girlfriend at the time
had wanted to get her tragus pierced, so on her birthday (Halloween 1996) I
drove from my college dorm at the University of Connecticut to Providence,
Rhode Island to get her tragus pierced, and my ear lobes pierced. It was
like lightning struck me when I watched the piercing get done. Keep in
mind, there was no YouTube, so when there was a curved needle, and a
cork, and all these glove changes... It was so incredibly fascinating to me!
It made no sense and I desperately wanted to make sense of it. By spring
of the following year, I was apprenticing in Connecticut, and by fall, I was
apprenticing at the shop I had been pierced at.
Sean Dowdell: When did you start body piercing, who taught you, and where?
Jef Saunders: I started piercing professionally at a shop called LunaSea,
which was a combination skate shop and piercing shop in Providence. I
apprenticed under the piercers at that shop, and I also attended the Fakir
Intensives in San Francisco, California. Fakir and his instructors are the
reason I am still a piercer today. They really instilled in me a passion for the
work of piercing that still burns in me to this day. I can’t emphasize enough
how big an impression Fakir, Dustin Allor, Tod Almighty, Ian Bishop, and Ken
Coyote had on me. They changed piercing from a business or a hobby to
something transcendental and good for the world around me. It was truly life
changing.
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