GERRY VISCO: Who are you? Aaron or Sharon Needles?

SHARON NEEDLES: Well, I consider myself a very passionate person, so as much fun as I like to have, I’m also the biggest asshole I know.

VISCO: Why?

NEEDLES: I think it has to do with me being a Sagittarius. Two people live within me. One’s a very savvy businessperson; the other’s a party girl. Part of me is a very sensitive, connected, balanced person, and the other part is a selfish, fame-seeking asshole. Terrorist, really. Can you say terrorist in New York?

VISCO: Oh yes, but you can’t be one.

NEEDLES: I acknowledge that I have no idea who the hell I am, and I think that’s the first step.

VISCO: Look at Sagittarius Anna Nicole Smith, for example.

NEEDLES: Yes, we share the same birthday. November 28th. I took her death particularly hard. I’m obsessed with celebrities and fame. I always will be. But that was the first celebrity death I remember taking particularly hard, after Tammy Faye Baker’s. I think Anna Nicole’s death was the first that changed the media as we know it, the first that changed sensationalistic news into 24-hour entertainment. And I love it. To this day I can watch up to 29 hours of CNN a day, in 24 hours. Don’t ask me how I do it. I’m obsessed with media and news. I could watch it all day.

VISCO: You sound like my mother. Are you like some old lady from Pittsburgh? No, you’re from Newton, Iowa, right?

NEEDLES: Yes. I love what news has become. It’s no longer based on facts, it’s based on entertainment. And it makes you wonder. You look at cases like Newtown. Is adult entertainment killing our children, or is killing our children adult entertainment? I don’t know. What came first, the chicken or the egg?

VISCO: So when did you leave Newton? You ran away from home?

NEEDLES: When I was 16, I ran away to the glossy, high-end, celebrity-addled major city of Des Moines, Iowa. Which was 36 miles away from my farming community.

VISCO: I like people from Iowa, though. They can be really nice.

NEEDLES: Oh, now that I look back upon it, I’m very happy that I came from Iowa. It’s an interesting, progressive place, but I was raised by a television set and I knew there was more than six-foot-high corn and methamphetamine labs. I knew the world worked the way it did inside my TV, and I didn’t really waste a lot of time figuring that out. So I left high school at 16, and a lot of people say, “Don’t you wish you had finished your education?” and I always say, “But I got my degree at Fuck U.” And a bachelor’s at Screw U. To this day I can still beat out anyone I know on Jeopardy!. School only teaches you how to conform and stand in lines. I don’t stand in lines. I snort them.