We're the ones your mother warned your about...No, seriously. We are.








There's more than just me here. Hopefully, by tomorrow night, I'll have the other bronzers that have weighed in coded & posted. But honestly? I'm lazy, I'm tired, and I have to get up early tomorrow to do a drug test for a new job. (New job! new job! But that's an article for another week. stay tuned.) So, since I figure I shouldn't ask anyone to do anything that I'm not wiling to do, I should go first.
Unless I suggest that you sit on it & rotate. That's pretty much a "you" kind of experience. Just so we're clear.

Claris
Years Posting :
Five
Street Cred :
She who borrowed a snake
Nicknamed the Evil Apprentice to Joss, because at the time, he was thought to be the only living soul getting less sleep than me.
Purpose: General mischievousness
Thing you should never forget :
Supposedly, there's this girl in England that looks just like me, or so the UKers keep saying. It's not me. Really, it's not.

You cannot begin to imagine the Bronze.

My first year of college, I was working third shift, and poking around the internet. It was the beginning of season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I happened upon the official site that the WB ran.

Inside that site was the Bronze.

The Bronze was, by the strictest of definitions, the posting board run on that site, frequented by fans of the show, and at times, the cast and crew. It evolved into the entity I discovered from the TV James board, as its called, which is the original board before the WB gave the contract to Apollo. I think. It's this whole long thing, and I've never been entirely crystal on the process.

But that's a long story unto itself.

So I found the Bronze. I went back. Then I went back the next night. Because you see, the Bronze was the most amazing thing to me.

It was challenging. And that - that was good. Because, you see, I'm a dork. I'm a big dork. And really, that's not as widespread as you'd think.

But I found the Bronze, and I found the most amazing thing.

There were other people out there like me.

No, for real. People who not only didn't mind the fact that I was a geek, but guess what? They were geeks too! I was addicted. You have to understand. My job at the time was more than a bit of a no-brainer. The school I was getting my degree from I was attending basically because it was free, thanks to tuition reimbursement. So there I was, coasting through my first year of school where I was bored to shit, at a job that while it paid, wasn't really anything that I gave a damn about, and here was the Bronze - a "place", if you will, that I could go to and justŠbe. Yes, there was discussion of Buffy. That was integral, and as someone that's a fan of the show, I had no problem with that. But there was also conversation regarding current events, book groups, really weird facts about bugs from Terwilliger, and one night, I remember a bunch of us banded together to help one Bronzer pull together the research for her term paper on Teutonic Plates. I think I was online for what, almost a year before I found out the next really cool part.

There were Bronzers near me. Okay, yeah, I know I was a little slow in that it took a whole year, but I wasn't posting with the East Coast people most of the time, you see. I was working third shift ­ 11pm ­ 7 am. Because of the time difference, I spent most of my nights talking to Aussies, UKers, West Coast people, and the occasional insomniac from the East Coast. We were known as the "L.O.S.E.R.s" - Lovers Of Sleepless Evening Repartee-athons. (Thank you Ty King!) In fact, when Leather Jacket was coming to town once, Little Sister mentioned to him that I was going to be there, and his reaction was, "Claris is in the country?" It seems he'd thought I was Australian for the last year and a half because of when I posted. Oops.

But one day, my nine am class was cancelled. Since I still had one at eleven, I snagged a computer to shoot the shit in the Bronze for a while during the time period known as "Coffee Clubbers" and I remember remarking aboutŠsomething on the local Boston radio station. Monique posted back to me, "Wait a minute, you're near Boston! Dude! I didn't know that! You're a Boston Bronzer! We've got an email list and everything!"

And they did. About three weeks later, I went, of all things, apple picking with a group of them. That was my first introduction to Bronzers ­ at Megdalen's house. Now, I knew that Meg & I both lived in NH, but I needed directions to her house, since she was about forty minutes away. I e-mailed and asked for directions from Lobonberry*. The reply I got was, "Wait. You're in Lobonberry? You didn't go to high school there, did you?"
Turns out that of all the people, in all the countries that the Bronze spans ­ the first Bronzer gathering I went to was at the house of someone that graduated from my high school the year before I was a freshman. I can't make this shit up. Blew my mind. *No, Meg and I did not graduate from a town that's actually called Lobonberry.

I went apple picking. And then I drove down to Massachusetts. And then I did it again. And suddenly, I hadŠ.my posse. I had my people. We went shopping, we got together at Polgara's house (she was still in Boston then) and yelled at the screen during I Will Remember You. We went to Chris Golden's signings so that there would be people there that didn't call him "Mr. Golden." There were fights, there was plotting, there was splitting apart, and getting back together again. But those were Bronzers. They're wacky. They're my people.

So, what do you want to do tomorrow?