Out of all the entertainers I've photographed I cannot think of a sexier more photogenic model than Arianna a del.  Her eye popping images appear in the Alpha Productions Hall of Fame.  They appear in my M-16 rifle article in the Looking Glass.  Xtreme Magazine published two of my articles featuring Arianna, and now that I've been living here in Thailand for six years I've thought of her often, wondering if she's alive and well and if she's still as pretty as I remembered her to be.  Even while I was still living in the U.S. Arianna had disappeared off the planet.

Two weeks ago I got her e-mail.  I immediately emailed her back asking for her phone number.  Within hours I was talking to her on Skype.

I'm on the front cover of your novel, "Death
on the Wild Side, aren't I?" she asked me.

You took fantastic pictures for me, and several of your pictures appear in my book," I replied.But the front cover?  Nipples is on it.  The real Lori Mellon.  She's on it."

Arianna wanted a few pictures I had taken of her.  And I couldn't blame her.  Arianna had arrived out of nowhere, a complete unknown to the world of feature entertainers.  I first met her at Big Als in Peoria, Illinois where she was one of 19 feature entertainers staying at my hotel for the next three nights.  The car I had driven down was a brand new 2002 special edition Mazda Miata which only had a few hundred miles on it and a hundred and fifty of those miles were driven just getting to Big Als to take several thousand pictures for the Pure Talent Agency which was putting on its feature showcase at the club.

It's all coming back so hazily now.  Arianna was simply the cutest girl of the entire bunch and it wasn't long until we were driving all over Peoria in my new sports car with my top down looking for odds and ends that Arianna could use in her shows.  Over the next three nights I'd wind up taking hundreds of pictures of Arianna alone.

By then I was doing my Guns and Babes articles for Xtreme Magazine and I wanted to feature Arianna with the M-16 rifle.  Selling my editor, Jeremy McTeague was no problem because from the first time he saw his first pictures of Arianna he must have thought she was just about the hottest thing on two legs.  So I called Arianna up and asked her if she wanted to come up to my apartment on the St. Louis East side for a night or two and shoot some pictures with an M-16 rifle for Xtreme Magazine.  Within a week, Arianna was knocking on my apartment door after driving 320 miles from Louisville.  She had brought a girlfriend with her, an attractive girl who'd end up taking a few pictures for me as well, but all that serious business would have to wait until the next day.  I'd take the girls to dinner first, and then I'd show them around to a few clubs in my area.

Right off I took them to the Hustler Club which was just 10 minutes away from my apartment, and as soon as we got to the front door the weirdest thing happened.  I was immediately told by the doorman of the Hustler club that I had been barred from the club and that Arianna a del, her girlfriend and I could not go in.

Now you would think Arianna might have thought, Just what kind of yokel is this Jack Corbett anyway to be barred out of the Hustler Club as an undesirable.  But the three of us just smiled at the doorman as I asked him, "Did Mike Parker" (the manager) actually bar me? 

Yes the doorman told me.  Which I found to be very strange considering that among other things I had interviewed Mike and put my article featuring him and his club in both Xtreme Magazine and Exotic Dancer.

What terrible things had I done? I started to ask myself.  Let's see---one of the other managers had blown his stack at me and had forcibly ejected my nephew and me out of the club.  And when porn-star Gina Lynn was featuring at the club and her husband had invited me to their table where we could discuss getting her into a magazine---ah that's what started my problems with Hustler.  I had e-mailed my editor at Xtreme that Gina Lynn wanted me to do an article of her in Xtreme and Jeremy had responded immediately, "She's hot, Jack.  Line something up with her at the club immediately and if you are able to, get all the pictures of her that you can.

So the next day, I came into the club early, around 11 a.m., to ask management if I could take some pictures of Gina that evening for an up and coming article for Xtreme.  Mike Parker and his second in command, Ted, were not there.  The third man in command,  a D.J. named John, met me just inside the door and I asked him if he could contact Mike and Ted to ask them if I could shoot the pictures.

That night when I went just inside the door, John, the D.J., immediately came out to intercept me before I could gain admittance to the club.  "Gina and her husband do not want you inside our club," John told me.  So I left.

We did the article anyway, without my doing any pictures of Gina at the Hustler Club. But when Xtreme and I asked her husband why I was not granted admittance into the club that night I had agreed to meet them, he responded:  "We were wondering why you didn't show up."  Obviously someone was doing a lot of lying, and as things would later turn out I don't think it was either Gina or her husband.

From that night on, I started having problems with Ted, the assistant manager who was second only to Mike.  The night Ted ejected me from the club, he had told me he had heard that I had been telling a lot of lies about him.  Which was far from the truth since I had always liked Ted and had always looked forward to the good natured ribbing that had always gone back and forth between us, so it was impossible that I could have ever said a single bad word about him.  Once again, someone was lying.

That night, none of this made any difference to me.  I had Arianna with me.  And she found the whole incident of my being barred from the club hilarious.  The next day we'd do the photo-shoot.

To do the M-16 photo-shoot we had to drive forty or fifty miles out West of St. Louis into the idyllic Missouri countryside where we joined my partner, Vic Meyer and his wife at their stunning home out in the sticks.  After meeting Vic at a gun show and buying an M-1 rifle off him,  we became better and better acquainted as I started bringing one girl after the other to his house for photo shoots.  He and his buddies had the Xtreme Weapons, such play toys as Browning 30 and 50 caliber tripod mounted machine guns for example, and I had the babes.  And Vic's wife, simply loved the interaction with the strippers I brought to their house.   All of this would eventually result in the 2004 Xtreme Weapons calendar which was a three way partnership between Xtreme Magazine, Vic and myself.  Ironically, although Arianna did a fantastic job modeling with the M-16 rifle, she was fated not to appear on the calendar.  My article with her pictures was published in Xtreme but by the time we got around to the calendar project Arianna had decided not to become a feature entertainer and had very rapidly disappeared from the limelight.

At Vic's I must have taken at least three hundred pictures of Arianna.  I forgot how good they were until just two weeks ago I started going through all the pictures I had taken of her to decide which good ones to put up on the internet so she could download them.  There were so many to go through that I started rating them by stars in Paint shop Pro and anything over a three (I'd rarely give any picture five stars) I'd give her.  She must have had over a hundred-fifty pictures that ranked three stars or better.  Never had I found a model that could get that level of consistent stellar performance.

The next time I saw Arianna was at the Pure Talent Agency Feature Showcase in Mobile, Alabama.  This would be the second time I'd drive all the way down to Mobile to shoot a showcase for Pure Talent, and each time I loved going down there.   The showcases were at the Candystore and each time I got all that hospitality the South is renowned for.  Since the showcases were in February it was still cold in Illinois whereas in Mobile Februaries were a warm welcome to the frigid winters from back home.  At most of the showcases I was able to score a free hotel room for myself.  Once I was able to convince Pure Talent to get my room paid for in Providence which I'd share with a very young and very cute East side stripper who would be my photographer's assistant.  And once or twice Darien Ross, a feature entertainer friend of mine from Chicago, and I would agree to share a room while she performed in the showcases that I'd shoot with my Nikon D-1x.  This time I expected to have my own room. 

When I got to the front desk the desk clerk told me that my roommate was to be Arianna a del.  And I hadn't even asked for her.  Did Pure Talent decide to put us together?  Or did Arianna ask Pure Talent to have us share a room?  It ended up with Arianna and I sharing a room for just the first night.  The next day a good friend of mine was coming down who was going to help me with all the picture taking and I had requested a room for him.  Arianna wound up going down the hall to share a room with Carrie Bare who ironically would be the Xtreme Weapons calendar girl with the M-16 rifle.

I was to be at the same hotel once again with Arianna and the other Pure Talent Feature entertainers and possibly even be her roommate again.  The event was still another Pure talent Feature Showcase in Philadelphia.  But at the last minute just as I was pulling into Philadelphia, Arianna called me on my cell phone to tell me she couldn't make it. 

I'd see her one last time.  This time it was at Big Daddy's in Dixon, Missouri after I convinced Paul to book her as a feature entertainer.   Arianna had lost a lot of weight and she didn't seem to be the same Arianna as she had been.   To my knowledge it was the last time she'd ever feature.  I would become fast friends with another Louisville entertainer, Montana Steele, whose husband used to work in Arianna's home club as a D.J. but none of us could ever find out much about Arianna.

But her pictures endure.  She will always be very special to me, the girl who took the best pictures and the very first girl to sit next to me in my new sport scar as we cavorted around Peoria together.