Somewhere in 1995, I got a clunky desktop computer with the enormous memory of 512K and a 56K modem! It was for grad school but who knew the magical mystery tour it was going to take me on? I joined America Online in early 1995 when it was an hourly subscription service. My first screen name was DLF7007, my initials and the number of the key to my Mazda.
When I first discovered chat rooms I was a silent watcher. I ended up in a chat room named “Talk about pets” or something, and when somebody posed a question to me I was so horrified, I x-ed out of the room rather than respond. However, I soon became more accustomed to chatting and realized my screen name was very bland and uninteresting. My friend Mati Hari, said Frigidare was a good screen name. And she was so correct, it garnered a lot of attention when I entered a chat room.
In the early days of AOL, when it cost me upwards of 200 bucks a month to hang in a chat room for hours, you sort of figured that the folks in the chat room most likely had a job because computers were not cheap in the 90’s and neither was AOL. And most of the chat was civilized, fun, and flirty. And it took you on a wild, anonymous ride, where you could do anything and be anyone. Nobody asked your real name and nobody cared. I became a 5’7” blond with green eyes. Or brown eyes. Or maybe it was blue eyes. I never could remember. Alexandra had various occupations but I needed to keep it close enough to what I had knowledge of to make it believable. Alexandra gathered a ton of male admirers who were more than willing to hand over their phone numbers and addresses.
The thing about Alex was that she was me in a different package. All of the words, sentiments, playfulness, wit, sarcasm, were all mine. I was wickedly good at this anonymous game.