For those of you who haven’t heard about Tressler, here’s a primer: Up until this week she was the “society” columnist for the Houston Chronicle… while secretly moonlighting as a stripper. Her double life was exposed this week by the Houston Press and made national news. She was subsequently fired from her Chronicle gig and went on Good Morning America to talk about the whole ordeal.
But back in 2009, before all the current craziness, Sarah was an intern at the LA CityBeat when I was the senior editor there. Sarah was smart, she was determined, and to say she was eccentric would be putting it mildly. She was an odd duck. I remember her nearly constant smirking and dismissive eye-rolling during our editorial meetings, particularly (for some reason) when editor-in-chief Will Swaim would speak. Sometimes she’d call us (including Swaim) out for how terrible our ideas were–without offering the slightest hint of constructive criticism. We’d all be tossing ideas around and every-so-often we’d hear a loud grunt or groan from Sarah’s corner of the table.
Pretty, pretty ballsy. Your average alt-weekly intern is there to position herself for a job. Or at least to line up routine freelance work. Dismissing the ideas of the EIC and his staff in the least helpful way possible would seem to defeat that purpose. But her fearlessness cracked us up. Pretty much the entire CityBeat staff had spent time working under Village Voice Media, where sycophancy was the norm. I loved working with Swaim, but even I couldn’t help but admire someone at the bottom of the pyramid calling out the boss on occasion and getting away with it–particularly back then, when executive bonus culture and CEO worship were still thriving unchallenged in America. Not to mention Sarah did have some promise as a writer. She wasn’t in the paper that often, but she wrote a couple of great pieces during her CityBeat tenure (which I would gladly link to were the paper and its website not deceased).
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