My Blogging Mentor

Jazz awarded me the Blogging Mentor award. I have to say I was shocked and extremely honored (honoured, as she would say). When I first saw this award going around I started thinking about what it meant. Then, of course, because I have a spritely (spastic?) brain, I began thinking about my whole blogging experience. It 's a goofy story which is entirely appropriate as it is my story.

What happened was, years ago, maybe 2003 or 2004, I was reading my People Magazine and there was a little blurb about an anonymous Hollywood blog that had everyone guessing. I didn't know what a blog was, but I punched in the stuff and found a very funky website by a guy who claimed to be a Hollwood Player and had all sorts of interesting and sordid stories. He interspersed all these colorful showbiz anecdotes with little short stories. Because it was a big mystery about who this guy was, I became intrigued and did lots of research. I read the whole thing and checked dates and whatnot and decided it had to be Steve Martin. After the People article, I wasn't the only curious person checking out his site, and he got tired of people just commenting guesses, like "Are you Ben Affleck?"( Which was stupid of course, because he was obviously much older.) He started turning over his blog to guest writers and "friends" and eventually stopped blogging. I did once leave this comment: "You were born in Waco, Texas in 1945." He stopped posting close enough after that time to make me think I was right.

I also did a search on an expression once and found Plurp, a website that ended in 2004. I still didn't know the word "blog" in 2003, so I'd say, "I have to read the Plurp." Please don't look it up, because my comments there are very dorky.

I don't remember what the blog server was for "Steve Martin" but at the top of the page was a link that said something like "read other blogs" or something to that effect. I was bored one night and clicked on it and there was a page of recent posts. I would randomly click on them and most were boring or creepy, but one night I hit on one that was interesting to me. I have no idea why. If I remember correctly, she was a wife and mom of two kids in Kentucky and was in the healthcare business. I guess I just liked the way she said stuff. Well one night she said, "You HAVE to check out this blog!" That was Jay's Party, which is still there but ended in June 2005. (And if you want to check it out, you should start at the beginning.) I found it absolutely riveting! Remember the TV viewers on The Truman Show? It was like that.

Well, I found Jeanette (the cutie in the picture with me up there) in Jay's comments. The name "Jeanette" is special to me, so I contacted her to join her private blog. I loved her blog. We had that wonderful thing where we were very similar and very different (My favorite combination!) so I was always leaving all sorts of long comments and she always said, "You need to make a blog." Many times. Finally one day I did. So, I guess Jeanette is my blogging mentor. Thanks Jeanette! I'm really enjoying it!