Sarah Soda performs live as a 69-year-old chain-smoker four nights a week — no script, no representation. What she’s worked out about audiences, boundaries, and being watched is more useful than most of what gets written about parasocial fame. Sarah Soda has trouble remembering what she says on stream. Not in the way anyone loses the details of a long night — she means she watches the clips back later and doesn’t recognize the person making them. “It feels like watching someone else,” she told me. “I have a hard time recalling facts or lines from the call after it’s over.” For a few hours, four nights a week, she hands the wheel to a 69-year-old woman who doesn’t exist, and when she takes it back the road behind her is mostly dark. The 69-year-old is Sue Dillon. If you’ve spent any time on live TikTok you may already know her: bedazzled cigarette earrings, a voice that sounds like it was cured in a smokehouse, a bottomless appetite for grievance, and a phone. Behind her is Sarah, a Tennessee performer with a doctorate in psychiatric-mental health nursing, 1.3 million followers, and no agent or manager of any kind. The act is prank calls, performed live and unscripted in front of a crowd that submits the targets in real time. There’s no second take. Tinsel Magazineran a profile of the act in March. This is about the part that didn’t fit. Start with the question I couldn’t stop turning over: when a viewer types a name and one line of setup into the chat, and Sarah has to produce a believable phone call in the seconds before she dials, what is that like from the inside? Her answer was less mystical and stranger than I expected, both at once. The first job, she said, is just gathering enough detail to make the thing land — the few facts that will make a stranger on the other end believe Sue is real. After that she tries to get out of her own way. “I really have my best moments when I live in my subconscious as much as I can while I’m awake. I just let stuff flow, and there’s no logic behind it besides just knowing the facts.” She called it a flow state, and then she went somewhere that word usually doesn’t. “Sometimes I’m just as shocked by what I say as the audience is. Sometimes I feel like I’m dissociating.” The name she likes for it is “persona magic,” and the trick, the way she describes it, is turning the conscious mind down as low as it will go. It’s the kind of thing a jazz player or an improviser will tell you about a good night, when the part of the brain that second-guesses goes quiet and something trained takes the controls. The difference is that almost nobody has bothered to treat what happens on a live prank stream as that sort of skill, with that sort of cost. Sarah has been building it for four years and still can’t fully account for it to herself. She didn’t always work this way. In the beginning she made the calls with the camera off, which was faster and got more done. Going live slowed everything down and handed her an audience to manage on top of the act itself. She kept doing it anyway, for reasons that turned out to outweigh efficiency. Some of it is plain business — the livestream is the advertising, the reach, the paycheck, and she’s clear-eyed that it’s what gave the character both legs and an income. But the part she lingered on was less transactional. Going live gave her a set to perform from, which gave the character a home, which let the lore grow. And the room gave her back something that working from home had been quietly draining away. “It can be very isolating doing most of my work from home,” she said. “Getting to interact with the audience helps give me a great sense of community.” She isn’t sure she’d have lasted four years without the energy the crowd feeds back to her. Which leads to the people in the room, and to the thing she understands about audiences that the louder conversation keeps missing. Not everyone in her chat is passing through. Some of them have been there for years, and she knows them — knows their energy, knows the running jokes, notices the instant one of them goes quiet. They set the temperature. “People tend to bandwagon onto the mood present in the chat,” she said, “and when the room has a positive and happy vibe, they feed off of that the same as I do.” First-timers walk in and catch whatever the regulars are putting out. The regulars also keep the lore — the recurring bits, the ongoing storylines, the in-jokes that stretch week to week — and they carry it forward when Sarah is deep in a call and can’t. She summed it up in one line: “The audience and the people building up the show are the same.” And then, because she clearly means it, she added that the people who keep coming back deserve credit for what they bring. The standard picture of an online performer is a broadcast — one person produces, a large crowd consumes, and a small, unstable fraction of that crowd loses its grip on the difference between the two. The picture is real enough at the top of the pyramid. It has almost nothing to do with what a Sue Dillon stream actually is on a given night, which is closer to a small theater company than a broadcast: a performer, a few dozen regulars, and a live chat, assembling a continuous show together in real time. The regulars aren’t fans in the passive sense. They’re closer to an uncredited ensemble — the show doesn’t happen without them, and Sarah knows it, which is rarer than it should be. This is also where the now-familiar worry about parasocial relationships actually lives, though it looks different up close than it does in the essays. The last two years have produced a steady run of pieces about fans who feel they know a creator and act on it — Chappell Roan asking her audience to back off, the stalking stories, the broad sense that the distance between performer and viewer has caved in. Sarah’s own read is blunt: she thinks Roan “crossed the line a bit,” and the figure she points to instead is Beyoncé, someone who keeps her private life private while still giving fans real time and space. The distinction she draws from that is the one she runs her own career on. She doesn’t withhold herself from the audience; Sue Dillon is fully available, four nights a week. What she withholds is her actual life. “I only share stuff that I’m okay with people being in the middle of,” she said, “very little of which stems from my personal life.” The gift economy is where it gets instructive — the part of live-streaming the celebrity-scale conversation never touches, because celebrities don’t live inside it. On these platforms, viewers send virtual gifts that convert into real money, and the creator takes a cut. Most of the time it’s exactly what it looks like: appreciation. Sometimes it’s a lever. “Some people who are manipulative will gift just so they feel like I owe them,” Sarah said. “Or they gift you expecting you to return the favor, and then when you don’t do what they want, they try to drag your name and smear you.” The gift turns into a debt, and the debt into a demand, and the platform hands the manipulative viewer a built-in way to make it. Her response is unfussy and total. She names the rules on stream — that she’s grateful, that she doesn’t live off gifts, that every gift is optional and nothing more. And the second a viewer tries to convert a gift into control, the conversation is over. “Anytime I feel like someone is trying to control my action or behavior, it’s an automatic ‘you’re out.'” No warning round, no negotiation. “I’m not that desperate for money or views to allow an unhealthy dynamic between me and a fan.” She has been running, in real time and at small scale, the exact boundary the bigger pieces keep theorizing about — and she’s been running it for years. There’s one more thing, and it’s the thing she most wishes someone would ask. The act splits people. Half the room finds the calls funny; the other half thinks they’re cruel. The second half gets to her. “I really have pure intentions and would never want to hurt anyone,” she said, and you can hear how badly she needs that to be understood. What she’s done with that split is the most interesting answer in our entire exchange, and it has nothing to do with prank calls. She grew up, by her own account, with low self-esteem. Then she built a career on a stage where thousands of strangers form opinions about her in real time and say them to her face, night after night. The obvious outcome would be that this breaks a person. It did close to the opposite. “It’s really strengthened how much weight I put on my own opinion of myself versus other people’s,” she said. “I feel way more confident and grounded.” Years of absorbing every possible reaction to herself left her, strangely, less governed by any of them. The philosophy she landed on is almost suspiciously plain: “If I’m happy with what I’m doing, then that’s all that matters.” She’s honest that it isn’t finished. Some nights still sting; she calls it a work in progress, leaps and bounds from where she started but not done. Which is its own kind of answer to the parasocial question — not a blocking policy or a boundary so much as a whole disposition, worked out the hard way, in public, in front of the same audience that helped build the character in the first place. The conversation about creators and their audiences has mostly been held from the top down, by and about the most famous people in it. The person who seems to have actually worked the thing out is in Tennessee, four nights a week, in character as a 69-year-old who doesn’t exist — and she got there not by holding the audience at arm’s length but by letting the right ones in close, and learning, slowly, to hold her own ground while they did.   The post Sue Dillon Doesn’t Exist. Her Regulars Keep Her Alive Anyway. appeared first on LA Weekly. ...read more read less