Named by her parents inexplicably for a queen and a saint, Jane Agnes Reynolds was born at the tail-end of the Season of Love to parents who, having skipped over the 60’s without either Woodstock or weed, were about to embrace the Swingin’ Seventies with gusto. While little Jane was too young to understand what the words “key party” or “battery-operated massager”meant, the Penthouse magazines Dad kept filed conveniently by the toilet proved to be both enlightening, and in the case of the Penthouse Forum, inspiring.
By the age of 15, Jane Agnes–known to her friends as “Jay”–had taken her first lover and had bid a fond adieu to her virginity without so much as a backwards glance or a moment of regret. Free of the cumbersome shackles that is the fear of “going too far,” Jay realized that with the right man there was no such thing as too far, and in a decade known for “More is More” and “Greed is Good,” there was nothing sexual she wouldn’t try. Or as she was fond of saying, “I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it.”
In an move that raised more than a few eyebrows among those that knew and loved her best, Jay chose to attend a private Catholic college on the East Coast. While she excelled academically, she found fitting in with her uptight, often prudish classmates and their rigid social mores a struggle. By the end of her first year, though, she figured out how their game was played. Soon, willing partners were easier to find, and while they were still few and far between, she was certainly pleased to initiate more than one boy into manhood.
Still, Jay yearned to find the kind of sexual indulgence she’d left behind in her hometown and she began confiding her frustrations to a cloth-bound journal she kept hidden beneath her mattress. She soon found that in addition to having a penchant for writing torrid love scenes, she also had a natural flair for storytelling. One of her earliest erotic short stories made the rounds of the English department and won her a small, regional writing award under the pen name Jeanne Lacroix.
Encouraged by her success, she left campus after graduation with a Bachelor of Arts degree in her hand and a little black book full of potential contacts in her backpack and made tracks for the once and future center of the universe, New York City. Her college contacts proved fruitful, and she found herself working for a small touring company preparing to take musical comedy to mid-sized theaters all across the United States and Canada.
From Seattle to Savannah, Green Bay to Galveston, Jay spent the first half of her 20’s drinking too much, sleeping too little, and indulging her libido with every one of its carnal whims. She pushed herself to the limit both physically and emotionally until she began to realize that she was writing checks her body and mind could no longer cash. She finished the last leg of the last tour and went home, ready to rest, regroup, and figure out the next phase of her life.
And it is at home where Jay has stayed. In a quiet old farmhouse just down the road from the middle of nowhere, she and a very good man are raising a family, indulging their libidos, and using a box of 1970’s era Penthouse magazines as inspiration, she is taking her love of erotic fiction into its next phase.
