Porn Valley- I had the following chat with Summer Haze at the time Club Summer Haze had announced their deal with Nectar.

“Hopefully we’ll be shooting for them and some of the Internet sites they want to do,” she said at the time. According to Haze, she’s probably in the best shape now she’s ever been in.

“In a long time,” she says. “People had seen me before when I was sick and taking my meds for [ovarian] cancer. I was a mess. I had a really rough time. I lost my daughter when she was two. I ended up where you can’t have children. You have so much scar tissue in there. They said kids were not on the agenda any more. It was sad, but with everything that I’m doing, that might be an okay thing because we wouldn’t be able to do a lot of stuff that we’re doing right now. I don’t think I would bring a child into this atmosphere. If my daughter was alive, I might have gone a whole different route than what I went. I don’t know if I would have done all this.

“With all the weirdos out in the world doing stuff to children and even priests and teachers and everything else you get really scared. You got to watch your kids like a hawk. It’s a shame.”

“What did you go through in your cancer treatment?”

“The chemo and the radiation,” she replies. “Just being sick all the time. One day you’ll wake up and feel good. The next day you don’t feel so hot- you pretty much stay in bed all day doing nothing. That wasn’t helping me out getting any work done with companies. Things like that. I had to do something.”

It was after her recuperation that Haze opted for plastic surgery.

“That’s when we did the whole taping of it,” says Haze. “We got the idea for a show. I think someone’s really interested in purchasing the footage from my plastic surgery to make it into something really good.”

“What did you have done?”

“I had upper and lower eyes done,” says Haze. “I had brackets put in my head for an eyebrow lift. They dissolved. They injected fat into my cheeks. They did full lipo- and the places I needed fill-in on my face and stuff, they injected my fat back into places where they took out the wrinkles.”

“How did you feel after all that?”

“Pretty damn shitty,” Haze laughs. “Pretty damn crappy. It felt like I was run over two or three times by a truck, then it backed up over me again. I think I was out of commission where I couldn’t get up out of bed- for about a week. It still hurts but you just got to do what you have to do to get going.”

“Now what’s going on with you and wrestling?”

“Basically it’s something I wanted to do for a long time,” says Haze. “I had an ex who was developmental for the big federation, the WWE. We decided that we wanted to go to school. I didn’t think it was going to be hard. I’d see the girls on TV all the time look at that girl running into the ring doing something great. I want to do that. But at that time period I was over-glorified ballet they call it. I was probably 30-ish. The moves they were teaching me weren’t super hard to do and didn’t involve a lot except using your head and being able to talk in the ring and being very over dramatic.

“I said I can do that and went to a couple of schools,” Haze continues. “We went to the Funk school in Ocala; and we went to a school in upstate New Hampshire. I learned a lot of cool stuff and learned how to talk to people and stuff like that. This time it was a lot harder because I learned all the basics; I’m learning how to get in the ring and actually wrestle a real match. You see the girls always get in there and kick the crap out of each other. I’m learning all that stuff, and I’ve taken some really crappy falls. I’ve hurt myself a few times pretty bad.”

“But I don’t think I would give that up because it’s definitely keeping me in shape,” she says. “And my outlook and what I think of wrestling is I have to give these people a lot of credit for doing this, because it’s really hard work. And me being only one of two girls in my federation, we just realize how hard it is. But the more you work at it the better you get. I’m in there with the guys.”

Haze said she’d love to do a Vivid or Wicked feature.

“Something to keep me current,” she states. “The new me- I know I can definitely bring to these projects a lot more than I could bring a couple years ago. I don’t think I had then the personality I have now. I could bring a lot more to these projects and would love to be on a Vivid boxcover. That would be great because I love Vivid stuff.”

“Let’s talk about Donn Benn.”

“He was my sixth grade social studies teacher,” explains Haze. “I grew up in Philly- Northeast Philly. I was an Archbishop Ryan girl. My dad is still there and I call him once in awhile to make sure he’s okay because he’s in his middle Sixties now and not feeling so well.

“I want to make sure he’s okay. And poor Don- he’s been in the business a long time. It was weird because I had this guy contact me one day after being at a convention. And he knew everything about me and I got scared thinking he was a stalker. I was like oh my God there’s this guy stalking me that knows my real name. He knows where I live. He knows where I grew up. I’m, like, there’s something weird going on so I got really abrasive and harsh with him. Then he explained to me who he was and I felt like an ass.”

“I never knew that Don dropped teaching and went into the adult business,” Haze further explains.

“The story I heard is that you were dancing at a club and he walked in.”

“No, we actually saw each other at a convention,” replies Haze. “Maybe it was the Exotic Dancer becaue I was just getting into featuring at the time. I remember it was when he and Steve Seidman still had the print of Adult Stars magazine. I was introduced to Steve and I was introduced to Don. But it didn’t click in my head because he didn’t look the same. I didn’t put two and two together at all until I finally had seen him again. Then it was, oh my God, it is him. We’ve been pretty much tight ever since- anytime he can help me do something, or when he’s sick I make sure I write to him letting him know that I’m thinking of him.”

Haze is asked what kind of kid was she like in school.

“I got my ass kicked every day,” she answers. “I wasn’t exactly a great looking girl in school. The glasses- now guys think that girls wearing glasses is attractive. But then wearing glasses and the kind of clothes around at the time weren’t the greatest looking. So I was a total geek. I didn’t have a lot of friends- just the people who were on the drill team. I twirled a baton and did stuff like that. So I hung around the band people where everybody was a dork. I didn’t have many dates.”

“So how did you lose your virginity?”

“I was maybe 17 or 18,” says Haze. “It was somebody that I liked in school. At that time I was starting to get out of that awkward looking stage. I wasn’t great looking but I wasn’t bad. I had a date or two here and there, whatever. And it was somebody I liked and we went out a few times. That was the end of that.”

“Do you remember the instance of the magical moment?” Haze says no.

“With all the crap I’ve been through my life and all the bad stuff- I just remember that I was the one who still wanted to date the guy but he wasn’t interested any more after that. I would say I was probably a stalker girlfriend. I was very bossy from what I remember him telling me. I think it was on Valentine’s Day that he told me I was too bossy for him and that he couldn’t take it any more.”

Haze broke into adult entertainment by stripping in some of the Philly area clubs.

“My first club was in New Jersey,” she remembers. “Camden. The Admiral. I was at The Admiral. That was the first club I danced at.”

“On Route 130.”

“Exactly,” she says. “It was a cool club to dance. That was the place where if you were a dancer and could actually dance you could make money there. You didn’t do anything but dance on stage then you’d put your bathing suit back on. Then you’d walk around the outside of the bar because you weren’t allowed to be topless or show anything. They didn’t have lap dancing. It was stage dancing and you got paid. Everybody wanted to work double shifts because the more work, the more money you made. And then from there I went to Center City Pinups. I was there for a couple of years.

“Then somebody told me about a place called Full Moon on Chestnut St. in center city- what a dive that place was. That was terrible. That one, and The Office. But The Office I could even make money. It was a tiny place where all the business men would come for lunch and you’d dance on a little platform. That’s all you had to do.”

What prompted her to get into that line of work was the money, says Haze. Plus the fact that she could dance.

“I thought that was the greatest thing in the world- I was asked to be a bartender at Center City Pinups but they found out I wasn’t old enough. They said as long as we can watch her, we know she can’t drink, we’ll let her dance. The owner took really good care of me, kept me under his wing and tried to keep all the weirdos away from me. Stuff like that. He was really nice. If I had to thank anyone to make sure nothing happened to me, it would be him. He was kind of cool.”

Haze notes that she and Craig valentine will be married four years, this year. But they’ve known each other for 11.

“When I first met him I featured at Crazy Horse II in Florida and he was a deejay,” she recalls laughing. “I hated his guts. He was arrogant. He’s still arrogant- everyone knows. That hasn’t changed! The porn girls all loved him and everything because he was a good deejay. He made the girls money. He was Blondage’s top deejay. They wanted him all the time to deejay for them. He babysit Janine’s little boy and stuff like that and knew them really well. They loved him because he made them a lot of money. He was their favrite deejay and that’s how we met.

“Then we ran into each other again at a Vegas convention,” Haze continues. “I still didn’t like him. But he was definitely in shape and was a good looking kid. I’m definitely a rocker girl. I like the guys with long hair. Nick Manning’s very attractive. Evan Stone is very attractive. With me it’s the long hair, rocker-thing. I thought Craig was really good-looking. And then our paths would constantly cross at different places. To me, growing up my dad would say things happened for a reason. Obviously we were meant to be meeting each other at different places. But we just didn’t know why.

“Then, eventually, one day I was with an ex boyfriend who decided he didn’t want to be with me any more because I was getting really sick. He basically said I can’t handle the fact that you’re really sick so I don’t think I want this relationship any more. I was out on the street with no place to go. So my friend who had a big warehouse called me up and said, ‘We’re going to come pick you up with all of your stuff and this is where you’re going to be.’

“So when I went over there they were shooting for and Internet company and Craig was the male talent. When I walked in, there was Craig half naked doing a scene. I was, look what the damn cat dragged in. There he is again. So he kept coming over to the warehouse and said, look, why don’t you just go out on a date with me once and see if you like me or if we have a good time. Whatever. Let’s see what happens.

“We went on one date- we went to the movies and we’ve been together ever since. I found out that he actually has a sweet side, he takes care of me and has pretty much made me into who I am today. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think Summer Haze would be as popular as I am.

“I owe him my whole life,” she continues. “Basically he took me out of the gutter. That’s where I felt like I was heading. I was drinking. I was a mess. I just had given up. I was heartbroken and pissed off that somebody would have said I can’t deal with the fact that you could be dying or something and can’t deal with that.”

“I had been living with that guy and Craig knew that. I would call Craig up if I was having a problem and we’d talk. He was, like, I don’t know why you’re with this guy anyway. He’s a loser. This guy [Haze’s ex] thought that since I was a porn girl he was going to ride the train. So when I got sick he couldn’t ride the Summer Haze train any more. I was totally heartbroken with that whole thing that someone would just not give a crap about somebody who was sick.”