First of all, hello to any Mount Holyoke women who may have found me through the article on blogging that Liddy Gerchman (who has a truly excellent blog of her own) wrote for the latest Alumnae Quarterly. I feel really privileged to have been included in the article, and I’d love to hear from fellow MHC students, past and present, with or without blogs!

Conveniently enough, something happened just the other day that reminded me once again of what an amazing place the Internet can be and how much fun it can be to have a blog. See, back in 2003, I wrote this article about a movie called Dirkie (or Lost in the Desert, depending on which country you live in). You can read the article for yourself to get the backstory, so I’ll just say here that when I wrote that piece, I fully believed that the whole story would be of interest to absolutely no one except myself. I wrote it because I was really excited about the discovery, not because I thought anyone would relate to it.

Needless to say, I certainly wasn’t prepared for the steady stream of comments that have come in from people all around the world who have, unbelievably, had the exact same experience with the film: they saw it when they were young and have been haunted by it ever since. I’ve been amazed to find out that so many people have this strange Dirkie bond, and I’m thrilled that they’ve all now shared the experience with me and with each other by leaving comments on my site.

The comments about Dirkie come in on a regular basis, and they always make me smile. But a comment that was left two days ago made me gape in astonishment - because it was left by Wynand Uys, the man who actually played "Dirkie" in the movie when he was a child! Now, to the uninitiated, this may seem like an unremarkable event related to an obscure film - but to someone like me, who has thought about this film for decades, and for whom discovering the title of the film alone was enough to elicit shouts of glee, this is an event on a par with…I don’t know what - having someone famous knock on your front door and say, "Hey, I heard you were talking about me…" I really can’t quite believe it. Watching the film as a kid, I never could have imagined that so many years later, the kid in the film would be writing to me - and apologizing for any anguish the film might have caused, no less!

So the mystery of Dirkie has kind of come full circle for me - and that, in a nutshell, is just one of the reasons that having a blog can be a blast.

Further reading…