Lola Pellegrino ’08 leads an exciting life. When not working at a haunted Providence sex shop or as a Love Detective, she fills her time with major surgeries, knight-filled comas, and BDSM seminars. And if you see her wearing an eye patch, you’ll know that you’ve seen her alter-ego: Lola Dam Sorrow.

Laura: Did you decide to have people start calling you “Lola” in college?

Lola: No, it was an organic thing. A couple people found out that my parents and my family sometimes called me “Lola,” and it caught on. Certain camps of people would call me “Lola,” and other people would still call me Lauren, and depending on who you knew you may move over to one or the other.

Justin: Was it just a pet-name or is there a specific origin?

Lola: It’s weird. People really pathologize it. They say: “Lauren is who you really are, and Lola is just the person people think you are.

Laura: That’s deep. So who are we speaking to now?

Lola: Both.

Laura: So you work for a sex shop.

Lola: Yes. It’s haunted.

Justin: What’s happened there?

Lola: It’s haunted with the ghosts of firemen because it used to be an old firehouse. They used to turn on all the vibrators overnight, so you’d open, and you’d hear this massive vibrating, buzzing sound coming from the ground. I never saw it, but my coworker did, and it stopped after she screamed, ”batteries aren’t cheap!“ It never happened again after she appealed to their economic sense. They’re all thrifty firemen.

Justin: Firemen usually are.

Lola: And they’d turn off the radio, and you’d hear them walking up around upstairs, and there wouldn’t be anyone there. Standard. Once I was opening, so the door was locked, and I was vacuuming. I was wearing a short skirt, and I bent over to plug in the vacuum, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was this big, black mass. I turned towards it, and it disappeared, but it stayed long enough for me to look at it and see it disappear. And I realized that a dead fireman had just checked out my ass. Harassment from beyond the grave.

Laura: How did you get started in the ”business?“

Lola: One of my ex-boyfriends told me that I’m one of those people who talks about sex all the time, and he was just going to get used to it. But over time I realized that it was actually him being a dick, and it was something that I was really good at. It was okay to talk about sex all the time, and it was okay to be really interested in it. Once I gave myself permission to think about it, I realized that it actually has some social worth. I started to think how I could help people with this thing that I obviously have an enormous amount of interest in. I’m thinking about being a sex counselor, and I want to be a gynecologist. And where can I start with that? Sex store.

Justin: Were you a part of the sex forum a few weeks ago?

Lola: No, I had to do stuff at the store instead. But last year I did the BDSM workshop, which was really fun.

Laura: Tell us what ”BDSM“ stands for.

Lola: What sucks about ”BDSM“ is that it’s a double acronym, so it’s Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism. Or it’s Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism.

Laura: What did you teach in this workshop?

Lola: I focused on safety mainly, because the people who did show up were divided into a couple of camps: people who were curious and people who had ventured in a little and wanted to know more. You can’t teach a whole bunch of people how to hit each other, so I thought it was better to give them a context, telling them why they would do this, and where to look for more information, and safety, and ethics.

Justin: Where were you last spring?

Lola: I got really, really, really sick. My gallbladder, which is the thing that breaks down fat, was misdiagnosed for six years, and they thought it was back pain, but it was actually full of gallstones, and it was about to rupture. It became really infected like an appendix.

Laura: Did it rupture?

Lola: No, it almost did. I couldn’t go to class anymore. And my boyfriend dumped me two days later, telling me that he just met the most beautiful girl in the world. So, I’m really sick, and this dude just met the most beautiful girl in the world— I was unranked by the way— and I just thought that I was going to kick over and die. I went to the hospital, got the operation, and then the doctor messed up the operation. So I’m dumped, I’m wicked sick, I’m almost out of school, I can barely function, and the operation doesn’t go well. And I’m in the hospital for over a week instead of just overnight. My mom canceled her 50th birthday party, because she thought I was going to kick it. I was in a coma, and I had a three-day dream —I was medically sedated, I was out— about medieval times with continuity, so don’t ever feel bad for people in comas, because the three days I was in the coma there were troubadours and knights. It was real time.

Justin: You should write a memoir. Tell me about being a Love Detective. Do you still do that?

Lola: Absolutely. Jess Lane ’06 and I are best friends, and we were trying to figure out the identity of a couple people, because Jess and her boyfriend at the time broke up, so we were looking into crushes and stuff. We wanted to figure out who has crushes on us, who has crushes on who, who’s with people, who’s not with people, so we decided to form the Lane and Sorrow Love Detective Agency. We set up an inquiry line, which is basically just a phone number that goes straight to voicemail. It dumps into a Gmail account, where we receive .wav files of the messages.

Justin: What’s the number?

Lola: It’s (206) 333-0390, and the website is laneandsorrow.com. It’s a really sweet thing. We had a guy from Minnesota who basically just wanted to vent. He was in a nasty love triangle.

Justin: Why is it called ”Lane and Sorrow?“

Lola: Jess Lane and I have an alter-ego Lola Dam Sorrow. I got my last name, the ”Dam Sorrow,“ from a ‘zine that I thought was cool, and Lola Dam Sorrow is characterized by me wearing an eye patch. I love wearing an eye patch, and I will use any excuse to wear one.

Justin: I bet you look good in an eye patch.

Laura: So you’re an American Studies and Gender Studies major? It’s not called that.

Lola: FGSS. Whenever anyone offers me any meat, I always say, ”As a third year gender studies major, I’m both a vegetarian and a punch line.“ That wins them all over.