In the SCA, Ardis was known as Countess Sumer Redmaene, and was Queen of the West with Siegfried von Hoflichskeit in AS IV (summer of 1969), and later served as editor of Tournaments Illuminated.

In the rest of the world she was known as Ardis Waters, and later Ardis Evans. With Sharon Karpinski, she co-invented "something that later was called 'Swimming Pool Fandom,' "according to Sharon, "which truly shocked older fen back in '65. We leapt into the hotel pool around midnight half-naked---only half-naked, mind you. I think we actually had panties and I believe even bras on. The fen, a staid crew of nerds in pith helmets, were still writing about it three years later."

In the seventies she survived an intracranial aneurysm, a house-fire that destroyed all her possessions while she was in hospital, and later a divorce. She wrote a short story, more or less just to prove she could, and sold it to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. But she dropped out of both fandom and the SCA around that time, and in the eighties she began to suffer from the liver disease that would eventually kill her.

According to her doctors, she was a good candidate for a liver transplant; but because she could not afford it and was turned down more than once for Social Security Disability Insurance, which would have qualified her for MediCal and a transplant, she could not get one. Only this April Social Security finally granted her disability. (The judge is reported to have said that she should have been granted it years ago.) Then MediCal paperwork/red tape provided more delays. She received her MediCal approval about two weeks before she died.

There will be no funeral, but there will be an informal memorial gathering on 26 July at Artist's Point (just down from Rock City) on Mt. Diablo.

Full Memorial: http://www.sff.net/people/melisa/adventures/ardismemorial.htm