From estephen@emf.emf.net Sun Sep 24 18:10:57 PDT 1995 Article: 2906 of alt.fan.wednesday Path: news.emf.net!emf.emf.net!estephen From: estephen@emf.emf.net (E. Stephen Mack) Newsgroups: alt.fan.wednesday Subject: The BevINTERVIEW Date: 24 Sep 1995 09:18:51 GMT Organization: Winter Weather, Berkeley, CA Lines: 822 Message-ID: <4437pr$grr@emf.emf.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.149.0.20 BevINTERVIEW 9/21/95 What is this? ============= This is the BevINTERVIEW. I see that. But what is the BevINTERVIEW? ========================================== "Bev" refers to "Beverley R. White," who is also known as Wednesday. For more information, you must read the Frequently Asked Questions files: Olorin's Wednesday FAQ and the BevFAQ. These may well be posted soon. The article you read now is an INTERVIEW of Wednesday, which was conducted to aid in the creation of the BevFAQ. How did the BevINTERVIEW come about? ==================================== In the process of preparing the BevFAQ, I interviewed Beverley R. White over the phone, on Tuesday, September 4, 1995, from 10:20 p.m. until 11:55 p.m. An approximate transcript of that interview is below. (Beverley has made a few changes and approves of it being posted. So it's authorized.) About the interview =================== Beverley and I had never spoken before, and not really communicated much by e-mail. I think we were both a little nervous; I called her long-distance and typed her answers as best as I could. It started out a little scattered, but soon settled down into real matters. It's not really appropriate for me to comment, but I will anyway. Beverley is an intensely interesting person, and she has a large following (as attested by both the traffic on her newsgroup, alt.fan.wednesday, and the large number of Usenet personalities who have good things to say about her). She's also going through a transition period, and grappling with the issues of identity and self-confidence. Which are the struggles we all face; it's just that she faces them more eloquently -- and poignantly -- than most of us. My favorite Beverely signature is the one that contains the line, "Auuugh! Single personality disorder! No cure!" That's the truest summation of the daily dilemma of living that I've ever heard, and I think it's very revealing of Beverley as well. The Interview ============= Zeigen: It starts with one question, which is probably the hardest one really. Who is Beverley? Beverley: Auuugh! [laughter] [pause, as I type her answer] Of course he writes this down. Ummm... I'm still figuring that out. I end up relying on a lot of people's outside observations at times, because most people are supposed to find out who they are as they grow up and I didn't want to do that, so I made up personali- ties instead. After seven years of net.personas, I made people up and they had different names and Beverley fell by the wayside. And as far as I knew she was just some...boring little thing that listened to music nobody wanted to listen to and read books that nobody wanted to read and talked about things that no one wanted to hear, and basically had all the shit of the world dumped on her and had nothing to give back. And of course now I realize that she was able to make up all those personas, so she must have had something... Then all of a sudden I found myself in a position where I didn't have the creations to fall back on any longer, part of a natural cycle I suppose. I'd gone to the trouble over the past -- three years now? More than that even, I think, yeah -- three years to burrow through that. I guess I had no choice but to take a good hard look at myself. Z: When was this? B: The breakdown started in April, and has been making itself manifest over the summer. I had no choice but to start, and I guess I was eventually going to end up at the point where I wouldn't have the old masks to cling to and am I back at the same point. No, very few girls wake up and stick the soundtrack to Carmen Sandiego on their stereo in the morning. Most girls don't still read Dante's Inferno or the Anne Series by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Z: The Anne of Green Gables series? B: Yes, I prefer the later books because she starts making sense. Most kids don't dress the way I do, or act the way I act or lack the social skills I lack. [laughter] I don't know what I'd tell them because it's started to break down. I don't know where to separate myself from Wednesday. Z: Is Beverley the same as Wednesday? B: Yes and no. Wednesday is a part of Beverley but Beverley is not essentially Wednesday. Z: Can you be specific about their differences? B: Let me think. Wednesday flirts, for example, Beverley doesn't. Wednesday aggressively goes out and deals with people, Beverley is scared shitless of people. Wednesday has to be obscure, or esoteric, or unrecognizable -- she has to not make sense in some perverse way that makes sense. Beverley will just out and out say, "I'm having a really bad day so just leave me the hell alone." (You may have noticed there's been a preponderance of posts like that lately.) Wednesday was built to have the social skills that Beverley never had. Z: What about Phoebe? B: Phoebe doesn't really have a life of her own, for all intents and purposes. Phoebe is a title, nothing more. She didn't start out designed to be that way. She was just created for the BOB(c)NET application. Z: Where did the name come from? B: She was named after an All My Children character. Some people thought she was named from the girl on _Friends_, but no, she's from a soap opera. Z: And what role did she have? B: She was essentially going to let me partition Beverley into something packagable and presentable to the general public. And it didn't work! Z: Why not? B: I made the mistake of trying to create a persona for dealing with an online organization that was, at the time, made up largely of Andrew Damick's ego. Ooops, better make that Andrew S. Damick. Z: In e-mail I mostly just call him Andy. We'll get back to him. Would you consider Phoebe, Wednesday and Beverley to be different split personalities? B: Not anymore. Z: At what point did they change? B: About the third roller coaster in at Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio in the last weekend of June. The inverted one. It was the most terrifying one of the batch. I had also just managed to overdose on painkillers and I hadn't eaten in two days. The combination of the adrenalin and the sheer terror involved -- before that day I had never been on a roller coaster before -- and the company I was keeping -- I don't think my brain could take it anymore. I can't really explain the process. I got on the roller coaster with three remaining points of view on the world -- three parallel and contradicto- ry tracks and points of view, and I come off with one. And I still don't know what happened. Z: Who was with you? B: Andy, Israel Day and Nate Hill and a couple of other people whose names I forget. And Matt Damick. Z: Was that the first time that you posted with your real name? B: Posts had been leaking out from Beverley R. White, but only to alt.fan.the-bob. Actually, that's not true -- the first place was alt.sexual.abuse.recovery -- I would use the name as a stamp of, "Okay, you just pissed me off so I'm so mad at you that I'm going to use my legal name at you." Z: And when was the first time you posted? B: Summer of 1992. [Note: Beverley later commented: "I was wrong. Late winter/early spring 1992."] That was before Wednesday was popular. I've been on the net off and on since 1988, possibly 1987. Mostly over my parents' shoulder at the beginning. Z: Who were you when you first posted? B: Cripes, I can't even remember what name I first used. I think it was Darella C. Pierson or some variant on that name. Z: Who was that? B: That used to be a character in a role-playing game that I was involved with with a friend. I liked the name Cinderella and I wanted to condense it basically. I wanted to be Cinderella, I figured I was comparing myself to Cinderella. I figured I was stuck in the ashes, and I figured that eventually somebody would come along and slip the bloody slipper on my foot. Z: How long did Darella post? B: Over a three-month period, very solidly on a.s.a.r., and then various events, which probably are best not documented in the FAQ, occurred which resulted in my being homeless briefly and then forbidden to return to the net when I got back home. Z: Wow. Huh? B: I shouldn't really go into that. I finally escaped my pitiful hometown... Z: Where was that? For the record. B: Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, So I finally escaped for college... Z: And where was THAT? B: Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I had adopted the login of "Roshane" (roshane@ac.dal.ca) but I don't know if I ever posted under that name. To keep my parents from finding out I was back on-line. That's when I became Leigha. I changed my name to that at school, that's what everyone called me. It's a corruption of Beverley, but I was named that for different reasons. I don't know if my parents ever knew about Leigha posting. I haven't spoken to them in person for years. Then I came to Chicago after two months. I had a nervous breakdown at school is the short form of it, and I basically gave my friend two weeks to get me out of the country, thanks to a lot of things blowing up in my face at once. I had an account on my asshole ex-boyfriends' BBS for a while -- I don't know if I've ever gone into lurid details about K. on-line, I probably have -- call him K. to keep the list of asshole ex-boyfriends straight. And around this point I went to see Addams Family Values. That's when Wednesday started. Z: Not the original movie? B: It didn't make an impact on me. Wednesday in the first movie had a really minor role. I had seen it maybe two months before I saw Addams Family Values, but it didn't make an impression on me. Then I went to see the second movie and there I was! My dark and morose and cynical and sarcastic and just plain terrifying self. She had that kind of morbid glow around her that kind of attracts you and terrifies you all at once and that's who I used to be, the image I wanted on the inside, and kind of the image I wanted to project. I mean, really at the time, I was little more than a mouse and I thought it would be really great to have something that ...didn't reek of that mouse standing in the way, and to top it all off there was that one part where she burns down the campground where she was forced to attend that summer... ...and I was sort of like that, wanting to burn down the campground I was sent to. I didn't really, but I made people wish I had though. And that was when Wednesday as a net-dot-persona was born. And as an external mask as well. The final aspect of that was when the geek boy in the movie was reading Stephen Hawking. Z: What? B: Have you seen Addams Family Values? Z: [sheepishly] No. B: Oh, you should see it! There's this little boy who's allergic to everything, wears thick glasses, skinny, geeky, annoying voice, no coordination, if his mother uses fabric softener he'll die, this ends up being the guy that Wednesday falls in love with, and by the end of the movie, they're seeing each other. Throughout my life that's the kind of guy I've been attracted to for some reason, and the type of guy I've had a relation- ships with. Z: Actually, I want to talk about the origins of Wednesday's net persona. Where did Wednesday begin posting? B: Well, there was alt.fan.addams.wednesday, which showed up around the same time I did, but sharing space with Christina Ricci-heads can get a little frustrating after a while. Alt.fan.the-bob existed, alt.culture.jesse-garon existed. I was jealous! No way, The BOB(c) gets a newsgroup and I've been around a year longer than him! People were getting newsgroups left & right, and I felt left out. I was complaining about this to Tjames Madison one night, and all of a sudden the next thing I know the control group went out, from Tjames' site I think. According to UUnet, no rmgroups were issued for alt.fan.wednesday. I'm the only person of the vanity groups to not be involved in an rmgroup war. Z: When was this? B: This would have been in May... Z: Why did you start posting in alt.fan.addams.wednesday? B: It was largely at the behest of Andrew Bulhak... I posted there; I'm still not sure why he wanted me to. That's when most people first saw me. Z: Actually, I think I first saw you when someone warlorded you. B: [laughter] I remember that. Warlording Wednesday was just not done! That was part of how the legend got started on a.r.k. I had the original Wednesday spacing sigs, and Bulhak and Yonderboy posted their own versions of them. And people said, "No! You're doing it wrong, this is how the sigs are supposed to look," and from there came licensing, justification and the proper style. It was no longer just a quirk of Wednesday's graphic design fetish -- it was an institution. I still don't get that. But an institution like that just does not get warlorded. There's no room to put Perth in there or Blacksburg VA. Z: Blacksburg? I haven't heard about that yet. B: Yeah, it's a new thing. Z: See, it's impossible to keep up. There's always something new. B: Well, that's part of being logged in all the time. Sometimes, I'm telling myself, "I just have to log out." Z: [taking her literally] Oh, you have to log out? B: No, not right now, I'm already logged out. See, you can mark this as one of the times I was not logged in! Z: Well, since we're talking about the Beverley that's always on- line...Is there another layer behind the apparent Beverley character, or is this the real deal? B: Umm...I would hope so. There's obviously going to be some amount of social veneer that goes on, but everyone gets that. If I was out in full force and impact, everywhere, well, the Usenet does not have enough room for all the tears. This is what support groups are for, I'm told. Beverley is a very depressed and angstful individual. I think that shows through, and that showed through via Wednesday. Certainly on the Web page. Beverley had a lot of crap happen to her, and she doesn't have the defenses and the coping mechanisms that her social masks did, and quite honestly, the weight of close to twenty years of bullshit and depression, is hitting all in one fell swoop. And, well, I can't really post about that on say, a.r.k. I mean I can bounce around and be immature on ark, and that's a part of Wednesday. Wednesday never really grew up. Not that Wednesday was an adult by any means. She carried herself more maturely and more anciently than me, I guess. A lot of people commented that they never knew whether I was 19 or 40- something. Z: But Beverley is 20. B: Not until November... Z: Ooops, sorry. B: I think of myself as 20 but I'm still not quite technically there. Beverley seems 20. Z: Sometimes I picture endless series of Russian dolls, that just as you open each one, there's another one inside. For example, you're talking about Beverley in the third person, even now. B: I don't know how to speak in the first person, for the most part. Z: But didn't you just use the first person? B: I said, for the most part. I'm learning that, very gradually. It's never been done before. There's never been a need. I think of myself almost like an IRC command, the action: /me does this /me does that Or I'll reply in a disembodied way, like saying, "sigh," "laugh" or "nod". Z: Right, I read about someone saying that recently. B: I do! I do "sigh" in real life, I didn't realize I did this. Z: Now that Beverley is on-line, has a manifesto, do you worry that your on-line personality will become different from your real self again? B: Not really. At least not so long as I have people around to keep that in check. Z: Who are these people? B: There's the people I see once every day if not every week, like Discord, who will call me on the bullshit immediately. She notices I'm doing something strange, she'll immediately write to me and say, "What's going on?". Abby, though to a lesser extent. Fritz Anderson. Z: I haven't seen him on-line. B: He shows up periodically and if I get into a flame war, he'll say something. That's actually pretty much it for Chicago, I don't have that many people that I see in real life. On-line there's Andy, and Olorin. There's innumerable people on-line who live elsewhere who will notice if something gets awry, like say "Jesse Garon." And Shawn was, but then Shawn stopped. Also, there's a bunch of people at CMU, whom I call "the family." Add to that my friends Lisa and Derek. I'm a dork. I forgot Lisa and Derek. This is why I hate lists. I forget people sometimes. Z: Let's talk about Beverley's real life activities. B: Auughh? What are those? Z: As a normal person, what do you spend time doing? B: Beverley shops, and spends a little too much money. Although she can't afford that today. I read. A lot. An awful lot. I go through books faster than most people go through toilet paper. Lately my cousin has taken to reading military handbooks, unquote. (A reference to Passion, the Sondheim musical.) I collect music, I sing -- I have a three-and-a-half octave range: alto with soprano list, to be precise. At least that's how it's been explained to me; I don't know much about formal music stuff. I'm really learning how to play the bamboo flute, and I hope to get my guitar restrung so I can learn how to play it. I draw, mostly portraits. Z: Do you have a job? B: No. I will not have a job until my green card comes through, and I don't know when that will be. This is why I'm on-line all the time! Best to say that I'm unemployed and have been for some time. I paint, I do graphic design (for the Web pages). I love Photoshop to death, can you tell? And I write. I never stop writing. On the net, or off the net, I never stop writing. I carry a notepad with me everywhere, I write down everything important that happens, and it will usually find it's way into something. Z: How often do you post? B: Umm... Anywhere from 10 to 40 times a day. 40 was at my peak, 10 is average. Though lately, I've been posting closer to 15- 20 times per day. Olorin would have a more precise count on that, he greps for everything I send out. I don't even have to grep for myself! Z: How much time a day do you spend on-line? B: That depends on whether or not I'm in town or not. I travel extensively. When I'm home, it's probably a good chunk of the day...and night. When I'm out of town, it's anywhere from an hour to three or four or so, depending on where I am. If I'm in Pittsburgh, it's three or four hours. If I'm on the East Coast, less than one hour. In Ohio, it was less than one hour of thee entire three or four days I was gone. Z: What about the Web and IRC, does Beverley participate as much in that? B: Umm.. I don't websurf much. If someone gives me a pointer, I'll go look at that. Most of my webstuff is blind, since I don't have Netscape. IRC -- I usually have a process running 24/7 -- I will appear when summoned. The nick is of course Wednesday. That's how I can be found. And I lurk on a couple of key-coded channels. Z: Is it Wednesday who is talking on IRC, or is Beverley? B: It's Beverley on IRC, but I've been using the Wednesday nick for over a year now, and to change now would be confusing. Plus there's already a Beverley there. Z: Wednesday seems to prefer different music from Phoebe. B: Yeah, I recently noticed that myself. I wasn't paying much attention. Then, you know, one day I realized, "Phoebe seems to hate electric guitar." I think both share mutual love of Celtic music, but that's probably the only significant overlap. That and Operation Mindcrime. The rest of Queens- ryche I can take and leave for all intents and purposes. But they had one character that the Wednesday persona identified with very strongly, Sister Mary -- a former street hooker turned nun who is engaging in drug trafficking and got raped once a week by her priest, and it's not clear from the libretto whether or not she's murdered or commits suicide, but Wednesday makes a lot more sense after somebody's at least taken a look at the lyrics. We've --what I'm saying we for -- I've actually posted under the name Sister Mary. Anything at deathangel.net, it's me. If you see anything from that site, be very afraid something's wrong. I don't use that very often. Z: When was the last time? B: During the Susan Smith trial. Z: _Susan's Eyes_? B: Yes, but actually there was a poem right before. _Susan's Eyes_ was posted by Wednesday. The poem did not come out under my name. It was about the children. Hearing tell of children being hurt affects me very deeply, for obvious reasons. Z: We'll return to that, but at this point I want to talk about The BOB(c). How did you two meet? B: The git slams onto a.r.k, saying that he's going to become a net.god, and he wants someone to create his dot-signature for him, and he's holding a contest. My first reaction is, "Who is this idiot, who gave him an account and what sysadmin can I write to to get it revoked?" So I make it my personal project so long as he's going to be an annoyatron on a.r.k. to lecture him that net.deityhood is not so easily arrived at as he would think. It doesn't come from a dot-signature, it doesn't come from any thing that you deliberately create -- it happens. You cannot create the godhood -- it is thrust upon you. (I'll continue to maintain until my dying day that that's how it happened to me...) I figured I'd try to prod him into being less of a git. I started paying attention to some of his writing, and I realized it was actually pretty fucking good -- so I was like, "What are you doing being such an idiot on-line if you can do *this*?" In addition it was a couple of the sonnets that had affected me pretty deeply, and I went maternal on his ass. This resulted in a series of emails back and forth about potential vs. reality, and out of the blue one day, I still don't know why I did it, I applied for BOB(c)Net. Z: And that was when Phoebe was born? B: Yes. Created to deal with that world, but, Andy would have none of creation. Z: So the entire emergence of Beverley is because of Andy, for the most part? Even though you talked about the drugs and exhaustion and roller-coaster, it was Andy's discussions that had planted the seeds for coming out? B: I blame most of this on him. I blame him for a lot of things, mostly good. Mostly. We started talking in about April, that's when email started going back & forth to any great extent. He was running a moo at the time, and out of the blue, out of nowhere, he consents to letting me have a character, and -- I didn't ask! He says, after a month, "Okay, you can have a character" and my reaction was, "What is this? I didn't *want* one! But, okay, I may as well." So we started talking daily at that point, several hours a day, it evolved to the point where we would each log in, sit down, and have Usenet on one screen and the moo on the other. And we'd constantly talk about what we were doing. We had had conflicts and I offered to telephone him to resolve them. He initially turned me down, and then one day after a month-and-a-half, he says, "Call me." I said, "What? You hate the phone!" At that point we had determined that we could trust each other. He started prodding me out of my shell. I don't know why I told him my real name really early on, because at the time I wasn't telling anybody. But it seemed right, it seemed honest, and he always called me Beverley. Z: Now that you're Beverley and you know that you're depressed, what areas do you try to work on the most? B: Going outside, though not entirely by choice. I don't like going outside, I don't like talking to people, at least not unless I have a veneer of words to hide behind, but I've got to go out or I'm going to go bloody stir crazy. Z: What else are you working on? B: Not regarding myself as some kind of freak of nature. Not letting myself use my past as an excuse to let myself stay curled up in a ball for the rest of my life. It would be really easy to do that. At least with the current atmosphere of society, victimhood is trendy! With the shit I've been through, I should have a bloody multi-million dollar contract to stay at home and be a victim all day. I don't want to do that. It's habitual. The first place I got any sort of niche, any sort of recognition, was the recovery groups. I created one of them, alt.abuse.transcendence. Actually I created two, I also created alt.recovery.addiction.sexual. But I don't follow a.s.a.s., because quite frankly I don't get laid enough lately to pay attention to the stuff. That is by choice. I'll complain about it to my dying day, but... I almost got pregnant at one point, so I decided it would be good to not risk that anymore. Z: Is that the real reason? There's nothing deeper? B: Yeah, that's the truth. Later it took on a more religious reason: not before I'm married. I know that sounds awfully conservative coming from me. I should stress that that's a choice I don't impose on anybody else. I stress that about a lot of the more conservative aspects of my being, I'm not sure why. Wednesday was out and out liberal, make no mistake about it. Wednesday was also any number of things that never fit me well. Z: So Beverley is more conservative? B: Yah. Beverley is more a political moderate; Beverley doesn't know whether to like Gingrich or be afraid of him (although that's something you could safely say about a lot of people). Z: What do you see yourself doing in ten years? B: I don't know, quite honestly. Assuming all paperwork goes properly next year, I'd like my own place. I dream really small, right now, because the big dreams never seem to work the way I planned. Never make long-term plans for yourself and expect them to work. A studio apartment, something nice where I can be by myself when I need to. I'll have a machine that will run Netscape so I'm not working in the dark. Maybe I'll have some things published. Hopeful- ly a job with an ISP. Whether it's in Chicago or somewhere far away, probably Chicago or somewhere in the midwest. Probably I'll be single at this rate... Z: But don't you have a lot of on-line suitors? B: Yeah, not these days. I *had* on-line suitors. Becoming Beverley definitely caused one relationship to explode. A man that was very important to me (but I didn't know what direc- tion the relationship was going to go) would only fall in love with Wednesday, and decided that Beverley was his friend and nothing more. I have not been dealing well with this. Mind you, I have no indications that I ever did. That broke me very badly, combined with someone else I cared about very deeply telling me that a relationship between us Just Wasn't Going To Work (TM). That's not something I'm used to hearing, because I'm usually the one who bolts from things like that. I do not have a primary relationship at this point, although there is one remaining dalliance with someone dear, with whom it will probably never really get beyond more than...a sexual friendship. And of course I despair that I will be an Old Maid. I liken myself to Fosca in the musical Passion a lot more than I'd like to admit. In the boot-legged Wednesday code, there is a section on that. Z: I'm not familiar with her. I think when I read the code I just skipped over that part. B: Fosca, briefly, her character is sickly, she's by herself most of the day, always reading, always reading, and she finds a solider with whom she develops an almost instant rapport, and falls madly in love with him -- and this is not reciprocated. I realize that identifying myself with her is going to cause more harm than good, and I'm trying to avoid it. The same with Sister Mary. Z: These are difficult issues. And I see on alt.fan.wednesday, people try to be supportive. Do you take this support to heart? B: Yeah. I do. I don't know what I'd do without a.f.w., to be honest. Actually I do -- I'd live on a.a.t. [alt.abuse.- transcendence] and wonder why no one was responding to me. I write things there that no one really knows how to respond to. Z: What role does alt.fan.wednesday take in your life? B: It's largely a sounding board, largely these little trolls of, "Am I the only one who goes through this?" And then I'll say, "No? Okay," or, "YES??? Okay, I'd better change some- thing." The comment I made in The Net magazine still holds, that most of my friends are made on-line. I insist on grounding the relationships in reality. For example, I make repeated trips to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania every few months. I made a concerted effort to meet and spend time with Andy when it became clear that we were going to become close friends. Z: But what about the strangers who you will never meet in person, the ones who read your posts or visit your web site and send you a quick note. There must be many of those. Do they help? B: They're helpful too, but in a slightly more removed way. I can never answer all those emails unfortunately, I get too many. Although less now as Beverley than as Wednesday. Z: How much email of that sort do you get? B: At least a couple each day. Mind you, I get 40, 50 pieces of email a day -- not counting mailing lists, other people who account for at least 20 or 30, and then Discord who I can't even count. But I get huge amounts of mail, I can't answer more than a tenth of it. I wish I could answer all the people who pop into the Web page. Any comments that are particularly personal or meaningful, or if someone suggests changes or alterations on the page, I will answer. But, I mean, what do you say to "nice page"? I need to add a disclaimer to those "mail me" things saying if you don't go into detail, I can't answer you. Z: Since it's getting late, I want to wrap things up. I'll end up where I began, by asking who is Beverley? B: [quietly] I still don't know. Z: But through all the personas, through all your experiences, I think there's one essential core characteristic that defines Beverley more than anything else. B: I try to be honest -- even at the cost of saying too much. __________________________________________________________________________ -- Zeigen estephen@emf.net Post # 10 Zeigen's Dilemma: http://www.emf.net/~estephen/ "This stamp is you're [sic] assurance of TOTAL quality control"-- my pants