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Today's Featured Biography
Susan Lopez Lopez-Embury
(This is long- got carried away!)
Since leaving Chamberlain:
Went to school briefly at HCC, but since I wanted to be an actress, I decided that I didn't need to study math. Quit HCC, and hung around Tampa for a while, then moved to Orlando, where I began a wild 14-year career as an exotic dancer. From Orlando, I took an 8-month back-packing tour through Brazil with two of my best friends, which began my travel addiction. I learned fluent Portuguese along the way and made close friendships with many fellow travelers.
Upon returning to the states, I moved to Huntington Beach, CA, where I began my career as an actress in earnest, landed an agent, and proceeded to audition, audition, audition. Still funded my life with exotic dancing, which also allowed me an annual month-long trip to some exotic location (Madagascar, Japan, Brazil again, Kenya, Egypt, Tanzania). I missed school, however, so I decided to take an odd class or two at UC Irvine during summers (existentialism, linguistics, Japanese, etc), and then enrolled full-time at a local community college for the fall of '95. While there, my teacher of Philosophy of Religion showed us the film Romero with Raul Julia, about the assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador.
That movie instantly changed my life. I decided that to pursue an acting career was self-serving and wasn't the best I could do for humanity, and that I needed to find my true purpose on the planet. That led to my desire to travel more, which resulted in my signing up to go to Japan for a dancing contract for 3 months. 3 months turned into 3 years all around the world (with a total of one year in Japan) and I acquired fluent Japanese. (Ii, desune!) All in all, traveled to a total of 30 countries during that time, sometimes returning several times to favorites (Kenya, Egypt, Israel, Brazil, Thailand).
With the help of one of my teachers at the community college, with whom I maintained contact, I discovered the Peace and Conflict Studies major at UC Berkeley and decided that was my calling. I aimed to end my travels in Berkeley California.
Along the way on a trip through Thailand to do my last 3-month contract in Japan, I met my wonderful husband and soul-mate Michael at Lucky Bar on Khao San Road in Bangkok on October 1st, 1998. We fell madly in love within 4 short days. We spent ten wonderful days together there, and then I continued on to Japan, and he continued on to his home in Surrey, England after his year-long trip through Australia and Southesat Asia. I convinced him shortly thereafter to join me in Japan, which he did for 20 days. He was hopeless at learning Japanese!
Early in 1999 I joined him in England for three months, then in June we both flew to visit my family in the US. That summer, I worked in Alaska (still an exotic dancer), and he proposed to me by telephone. We immediately made plans for a Bahamas wedding in April of 2000!
That fall, I relocated to El Cerrito, California (very close to Berkeley), and finished up my lower division at a commmunity college there while applying to UC Berkeley's PACS program. Still dancing!
I was accepted, and Michael and I married on April 27th, 2000 in Nassau, Bahamas with 60 of our closest friends and family members, and again on our honeymoon in Kauai. (Those of you who have imported a spouse from another country will understand!)
I graduated from UC Berkeley in the top 3% of my course in 2002, and then a year later Michael and I bought a home in Las Vegas, NV (CA real estate is prohibitively expensive!). Shortly thereafter, I learned that I was accepted to an MSc program at London School of Economics, so 6 months later we moved to London for a year. What a great year!! I graduated with Merit, and my dissertation (masters thesis) was awarded Distinction.
In Sept of '04 we both returned to Las Vegas, where we had in the meantime bought another home. We now live in the newest one, and just sold the other. Michael does real estate and I do research on sex work (which is what my MSc dissertation was all about), giving an occasional paper at the occasional gender or sex work conference. I am currently working to establish a Sex Workers' Outreach Project here in Las Vegas, as well as an informal sex workers' professional association. I am a political activist for peace and social justice, and a sex workers' rights researcher and advocate.
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