Behind the Screens at JennyMcCarthy.com

I know it's hard to keep a straight face, but give it a shot. Some people spend time collecting stamps, others helping the homeless...I spend those hours working on a website dedicated to Jenny McCarthy. It may be pathetic, but there's a lot to be said for the level of dedication (and obsession) I have to Jenny.

I wasn't born into this role. I had to work my way up through the system, and finally achieve the position I have today--Vice President of The Unofficial Jenny McCarthy Fan Club. It all started around April of 1996, when I started thinking of Jenny as a little more than just the co-host of MTV's "Singled Out." One day I had an epiphany that she was just the bomb diggity, for lack of a better term. So considering my background as a Web programmer and Netscape surfer-extraordinaire, I turned to the Internet to fulfill this yearning. I found endless miles of Jenny's Playboy material, which oddly enough (considering my usual love of such genius) did not fill the void. Next I turned to the Jenny newsgroup, "alt.fan.jenny-mccarthy." There I found a bunch of perverted, drooling 14-year-old boys from AOL. Near distress, I stumbled upon "The Jenny McCarthy Fan Club," a fledgling web site run by some guy named Douglas Pollok. I e-mailed Doug to hopefully find someone else who shared my feelings, and the two of us rarely have gone a day without e-mailing in those 18 months.

Sometime in early 1997, Doug somehow finagled the domain names "jenny-mccarthy.com" and "jennymccarthy.com," securing a monopoly on her moniker. Since then, after taking me on as second-in-command, we have unquestionably run the best Jenny site on the Web. No nudity, no perversion--just good, clean Jenny-worship. Among the features which no other Jenny page offers (there are somewhere around 200-300 others, though they tend to disappear pretty quickly) include a Document Archive featuring transcriptions of Jenny interviews and feature articles; a Sound Archive of sound bytes; a Picture of the Week feature; and a comprehensive Jenny Information page. In addition, wešve just added a Jenny-Quiz program, where you can test your J.Q. (Jenny I.Q.) as well as a Jenny Mailing List. Needless to say, Doug and I take this very seriously.

The whole Jenny phenomenon is kind of an abnormality. She has been in the public eye since October 1993 when she first appeared in Playboy, an achievement which carried her to early 1995, when she first started on "MTV's Singled Out." But she was undoubtedly the "It-girl" of the summer of 1996. Suddenly, America discovered the bubbly blonde, who was born and raised in the South Side of Chicago. Overexposed, nauseatingly popular...you just could not avoid Jenny for those three months. Since then, she has spent her time denouncing Playboy for not being able to take "no" for an answer (Hef can't stop asking Jenny to pose one more time), starring in The Jenny McCarthy Show on MTV, continuing her barrage of both American and foreign magazine covers, and now premiering her sitcom Jenny on NBC.

I'll admit, I was kind of embarrassed when I first mentioned to my friends that I was spending so much time working on a Jenny McCarthy web site. But it is one of my great releases. It is just fun. I've had some Web-related jobs that were not at all fun, but this one is pure enjoyment. Among my personal responsibilities for the site is reading the "alt.fan.jenny-mccarthy" newsgroup as often as possible, administering and programming the Majordomo mailing list, doing minor updates to the site, writing questions for our Jenny Quiz, and any other annoying tasks Doug can think up to bust my balls.

One of our more difficult tasks is to deal with the crap that goes on in the Web's Jenny-community. As you could guess, we're not exactly dealing with Einsteins here. We've had people steal our entire site (minus our "The Unofficial Jenny McCarthy Fan Club" header) and upload it as their own. We've had people steal our banner and use it to link to their own pages. Luckily I don't answer the site's e-mail, but Doug deals on a daily basis with dozens of "Where can I find pictures of Jenny's hooters?" and "Dear Jenny,..." messages.

Don't get me wrong, all the work isnšt totally thankless. Before we got our jenny-mccarthy.com domain name, nobody took us seriously, just as every other Jenny site on the Web is not taken seriously now. But the minute we got the domain, suddenly we were V.I.P.s wherever we went. Among our working business agreements are one with Amazon Books distributing Jenny's new biography, Jenny McCarthy's Uncensored Hollywood Diaries, as well as other Jenny-phenalia; and one with Mostly Posters, which sells her wall posters. TV Guide, Candie's Shoes (for which Jenny is spokesperson), and other companies come to us for assistance in marketing Jenny on the Web. I feel as though we have almost reached my personal goal, which would peak at flying out to Los Angeles for business meetings with Jenny on a regular basis.

In the last 18 months or so, I've spent thousands of hours on the Web, hundreds of hours answering e-mail, countless piles of money on merchandise and long distance phone bills (primarily to San Antonio, Texas, where Doug lives), and have lost a whole lot of sleep working long into the night. And for what? A woman seven years older than me whom I've never met? A female whom I wouldn't have a chance with if I were the last guy on Earth? I guess I'm still not sure why I'm doing it. But I know I will give it up when it stops being fun. Until then, I guess I'm just another pathetic teenager chasing a pipe dream...just in a little more advanced way than most.