About a dozen friends remembered Georgia Mae Santowski as a funny, spunky woman who loved to get dressed up and who loved children and animals.

Friends gathered Friday night in a conference room at the Garden Gate Apartments, 1201 Legacy Drive, the apartment complex where she lived in Plano.

They ate fried chicken and deviled eggs and traded stories about Santowski while a CD by Sarah McLachlan played on a boom box.

Then they gathered in a circle to hold hands in prayer and traded more stories about Santowski, 81, who died after acute intoxication triggered a heart attack, and then a burning cigarette sparked a fire at her apartment. She was not burned.

Janie Hill, 55, of Dallas, one of Santowski’s friends and organizer of the memorial, said Santowski had been cremated but that no funeral service was held.

“We just wanted to have something nice for her,” Hill said.

Also, she said that it is appropriate that the memorial was the day before Valentine’s Day because Santowski “had a lot of love for people.”

Santowski, known to her friends as Dot Dot, Dottie and Miss Dottie, was 4’11” and weighed 85 pounds, and she knew people from all walks of life, Hill said. “She was just full of love and she had a good heart,” Hill said.

Although Hill said that she and some of her friends thought that Santowski drank and smoked too much, “she was just a precious little lady.”

Santowski enjoyed being around her pets.

One of her favorites was Dolly, a yellow cockatiel. Santowski told her name to the bird, and eventually the bird caught on and would say, “I love you, Dot Dot!” every morning. She also had a white dog named Fluffy, a pet ferret named Precious and some rats.

Pictures mounted on poster board showed Santowski from her 80th birthday party, held at Chuck E Cheese’s, and at a Christmas dinner. Another photo shows her wearing a stylish, fitted, black strapless dress with gold trimming. She looks happy and pretty in the photos. “She was just a kid at heart,” Hill said.

Mums and pink cyclamen sat next to the photos on a platform. Santowski, who loved rhinestones and pins, enjoyed going to craft shows, flea markets, the pet shop and anywhere people would notice her, Hill said.

“She loved to wear boots, high heels and hats,” she said.

Also, she liked to go to Vicon Village. That’s where Hill met Santowski seven or eight years ago.

Hill was with Iggie, a pet iguana, which she dressed in various costumes to entertain children.

Santowski tapped Hill on her shoulder and thought that Hill’s dressing up Iggie was so cute, she invited Hill to her home. Then they became friends.

Santowski also babysat Cori Brown, 15, of McKinney. When she was little, Brown started calling Santowski Dot Dot because she couldn’t pronounce Santowski’s real name yet, and then the nickname stuck.

Brown said she fondly remembers going dancing with Dot Dot at a country bar, where Dot Dot taught her how to line dance.

Bill Merriman, 73, of Addison, said he met Santowski through a friend who rented a room from her when she lived in a big house, where she lived before the apartment. Then when Merriman separated from his wife, he was looking for a room and moved into Santowski’s home, where he lived for nine years.

“The one thing about it, you didn’t get lonely” living there, he said.

Since Santowski babysat many children, kids were always in the house.

“She was a very small woman and she loved to dress up and go out, and she liked to dance,” he said. He said he would go dancing with her a lot.

Also, he said she loved dolls that talked and moved.

“She had, like, 200 of them,” he said, adding that the kids she babysat loved all of her toys.

Sherry Simmons, 29, and daughter Danyelle, 4, live in the apartment complex where Santowski lived. Although Simmons said she didn’t know Santowski, she came to the memorial “to give my regrets.”

She said, “I was sorry to hear about everything.”

Sabrina Mason, 42, who lives in the same building, said she met Santowski last year. Santowski pointed to her garbage and said, “Honey, could you take this out?”

Mason helped, and the last two or three months that Santowski was alive, the two became more acquainted.

Mason would run errands for Santowski. Sometimes, if Mason would take awhile or get lost on the way home, when she would return home, she would have answering machine messages waiting, with Santowski saying things such as “Where the hell are you?”

“She was a real, real sweet person,” Mason said.

Alisa Stocking, 35, of Plano, met Santowski through Mason. Stocking, who led the group at the Garden Gate Apartments in prayer, also lives in the apartment building. Stocking recalled seeing Santowski wearing a coat that had a leopard print; she said that the coat looked like something that a younger person would wear, “but she looked cute in it.”

She also remembers hearing the fire trucks squealing when they came to Santowski’s apartment.

“I was, like, ‘Aw, man,’” she said. “It was horrible.”

When Mason spoke about Santowski, she said, “At 81, still sophisticated, caring and jazzy. You! Ms. Dottie, we’re some kinda classy.”

Ivonne Leyva, 45, who lives in the apartment complex, took care of Santowski’s bird for a couple of weeks last fall, when Santowski fell and broke her ribs.

She said she was devastated by Santowski’s death, but she said, “I know she’s in a better place.”

Also, Leyva said she is thankful for the times she spent with Santowski. She also recalled that Santowski would bring doughnuts to the cashiers at Wal-Mart at I-75 and Spring Creek Parkway and would offer to tell them dirty jokes.

“The last time I saw her, she was smoking a cigarette,” Leyva said, before choking up in tears.

Hill wrapped her arms around Leyva and recalled that one time, Santowski saw a crying child in a playpen at a daycare center. So, she climbed into the playpen to stop it from crying.

Leyva remembered that when Santowski was in the hospital, she was eager to leave to get back to her pets. Also, she was excited that, while she was there, her rats had eight babies.

“She was a spunky old lady,” Leyva said.

“I know I’m going to miss her dearly,” Mason said.

Santowski, who was born in Ardmore, Okla., was preceded in death by her father, Lewis E. Spradlin; her mother, Mae Ellen Spradlin; her brother Leroy Spradlin; her sister, Opal Owens; her sister, Wilma Faye Nicholes; and her son, Lynn Shoopman.

Survivors include her brothers, Floyd Spradlin, of Arlington, Charley Spradlin, of Tyler, and Preston Spradlin, of Carrollton; a daughter, Lana Charlton, of Oakland Park, Fla.; her granddaughters, Taffy Caradona, of Millerville, Md., and Poppy Cooper, of New Orleans; and seven great-grandchildren.