More than you really want to know about my email address...

I was sitting looking at a friend's email address this morning and going.... "Hmmm.  Oookay.... I really wonder where that came from?"  While a lot of people have variations on their names and or initials, followed often by whatever string of numbers their mail provider has chosen to saddle them with to differentiate them from everybody with the same name/initials, some are more distinctive. Even then, people can often figure out a name's provenance -- or so they think.  At least most people think they can with me. It's not quite straightforward, though.

Once upon a time, in oh, the early '90s, there was this company called America Online.  It was based in Vienna, Virginia, which was but spitting distance, more or less, from where we lived in McLean.  (Okay, it was down at the other end of Fairfax County, but still.)

It was still a young company, even though it had been around in some form for nearly a decade.  This was before it was acquired by Time Warner, before those damned ubiquitous CDs that appeared in mailboxes and magazines with dismaying frequency.  Back when they would trumpet "we've just added our 50,000 member!" (And oh boy, was it a big deal when they hit 100k!)  Before the sonorous tones of "You've got mail" became a pop culture joke and a touchpoint for a silly Tom Hanks - Meg Ryan movie.*

I was a habitué of the AOL's Trivia Forum chat room.  It was a good group of people: Tiger123, Jeopchamp (who had never actually been on Jeopardy!) and BDG (BigDumbGuy -- he was anything but) and many other wonderful people. It was my first experience of large scale psuedonymity, such as is the rule today on the Internet.   People would get to know each other, ask about each other's kids, or how the weekend in Atlantic City went, that sort of thing.

Each evening one or more of the hosts would run games.  (My favorite was "Dog's Breakfast" by Tiger123.)  There were no prizes, no glory, simply the satisfaction of having beaten twenty other smart people.  (One of the greatest challenges, actually, was getting into the room.  Each Forum had room for only 22 participants at a time, and 2 of those had to be the Host and the Scorekeeper.)

After a few months, and quite a bit of success as a player, I decided that what I really wanted to do was direct host games.  This was not necessarily a simple task -- the hosts wrote the games as well as ran them.  This was fine with me: I loved the challenge of writing the questions, especially the need to trade off clarity and difficulty.

I ran several games on a weekly basis over the next few months.  I started off with the rather mundanely named "Trivia with Pat."  I then decided to run a game focused solely on history: "The Time Machine." (For anyone out there who played a game named the "Time Machine" on the AOL Trivia Forum that was not run by me: it was taken over by other hosts later.)  It is amazing what you can shoehorn into the category of "history."

And then I started "Madame Verdi's Information Parlor."  Aha! most people say.  "Mrs. Green.  We get it."**  Let's get one thing straight:  I am not, nor have I ever been, Mrs. Greene.  That's my mother.  Or my aunt.  Or my brother's wife.  Not me.

No.  "Madame" was in homage to this woman:

Anna Louise Germaine de Staël, known by most people who have heard of her as Madame de Staël. (Many people have heard of her because of her most famous quote: "The more I know men the better I like dogs.")  She was a novelist, influencer of literary tastes, and ran the hottest salon with the best intellectuals.  Napoleon disliked and distrusted her so much that he had her exiled .  According to a contemporary source, Napoleon said that she "teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think." My kind of woman.

I am nothing like her, really.  She wrote very well, was incredibly influential, and had style to spare. But this is cyberspace, after all, where, to paraphrase the Rocky Horror Picture Show, if you can dream it, you can be it. And so the Information Parlor was born.

I called it the Information Parlor because I wanted to deal with more serious subjects than in some of my other games, things that people really should know.  As fond as I am of the fact, that Lincoln Logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright and were based upon the foundation that his father Frank Lloyd Wright developed for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, is trivia.  What the Kristallnacht was, or who Alice Paul was, most decidedly is not.  And somewhere along the line, I decided I liked this alter-ego, who was smart and stylish and who had simply the most interesting people hanging around her (electronic) parlor.

After a while, the time-requirements of being a full-time mother of two small children caught up with me. Something had to give, and trivia hosting went.  But I kept Madame Verdi in the back of my head: I used it in email addresses, I had a Live Journal where I asked trivia questions under that name. My (as-yet and probably-forever) unfinished trivia book had her name in the title.  The portion of said book which was sent around to friends several years back as a seventy-eight-page Christmas Card did likewise.  When I started this blog, I used the name as part of the URL.Each time I see that name, I think not only of my doppelganger, but the remarkable woman whose honorific she shares.

I hope Anna Louise would approve.

*You've Got Mail is one of the few romantic comedies of the past thirty years I actually like, in spite of Meg Ryan being in it.  Maybe because Tom Hanks is just so wonderful and lovable.
**Usually followed by "So, why did you mix French and Italian? Shouldn't it be either 'Madame Vert' or 'Signora Verdi'?" The answer to which is a most unstylish and unintellectual "beats the hell out of me."