The role-playing began in November 1994, according to longtime member Gussie Fink-Nottle, newt fancier and Drones Club member. "Aunt Diana (then writing as Stiffy) and I started a little in-character cross talk about the proper way to nab [policemen's] helmets," Gussie writes. (Pinching helmets is a popular sport of Wodehousean heroes when inebriated.) "That was a grand time indeed. There were ferrets about the place ... newts got painted orange and thrown into moats, people got potted, darning needles were bought [for puncturing the hot-water bottles of unsuspecting persons] ... in fact, everything that could happen in a PGW story happened."

All that was before my time. It was only about three years ago that I became Lotus Blossom, the impetuous redheaded American film star. "On the screen she seemed a wistful, pathetic little thing," wrote Plum in 1935's "The Luck of the Bodkins," "while off it 'dynamic' was more the word. In private life, Lottie Blossom tended to substitute for wistfulness and pathos a sort of Passed for Adults Only joviality which expressed itself outwardly in a brilliant and challenging smile and inwardly and spiritually in her practice of keeping alligators in wicker-work baskets and asking unsuspecting strangers to lift the lid."

Lottie maintains, in fact, that she has learned virtually all she knows about registering emotion on film by watching people's faces as they first encounter her pet. In my online incarnation, then, I let my alligator loose on occasion (Beach the Butler, if memory serves, had a nasty encounter with him, and the Dog MacIntosh was in serious danger). I throw back "shots of the needful" with admirable equanimity, and shrink not from the more controversial questions, such as whether soupy Madeline Bassett believed stars were God's daisy chain or the wee sneezes of fairies.

Now, I do not claim the AFW in-character posts are unique. Very likely Dune-fanciers, Trekkies and even Shakespearians are boldly beaming each other up and wherefore-art-ing each other across the Internet. I certainly wouldn't put it past them. And I know from my '80s experiments with Dungeons and Dragons that role-playing is nothing new. I merely claim that I am playing in a way that I haven't done since my Barbie dolls were packed off to the Salvation Army, or since my friend Becca and I spent one happy summer in Narnia.

This kind of play was a continuous part of my reading life from my first encounter with "Pat the Bunny" until sometime around puberty. I was Oliver Twist the pickpocket, I was Jo in "Little Women," I was Peter Pan and Pippi Longstocking and some little witch whose name I don't remember. With my friends and alone in my bedroom, I made up fresh stories and fantasies based in the fictions I had first encountered on the page. And then, somehow, I stopped. My life as a reader changed. I wasn't Holden Caulfield, Owen Meany or Lily Bart. I was never anyone again -- until I became Lottie Blossom.

What had changed? With no fellow Peter Pans to urge me not to grow up, I had become concerned with my adolescent sense of dignity. I abandoned my series of imaginary characters in favor of fashioning my own identity in the real world. Then came college and graduate school -- where reading became a profession. Playing at it became unthinkable.

What ho, Plummies! They came to my rescue when I was mired in the depths of my dissertation, saving me from a life devoted to reading "Types of Ethical Theory" and Spinoza. The newsgroup gave me a sense of membership. They were a supportive group of completely invisible like-minded souls, unconcerned with dignity -- just looking about in search of a cocktail or a lost pig. In the safety of the Internet's anonymity, and in the jolly comfort of a shared language, I started playing again.

Offline, I'm not hopping about the apartment in search of my alligator or crying "What ho!" at my husband when he comes home, but Wodehouse's world infiltrates my life in pleasing and comical ways. For example, I prepared mind, body and soul for writing this essay by eating large gobs of English country lemon curd on toast and drinking tea. To get me in the M., don't you know. Later this evening, perhaps, I will restore the tissues with a drop or two of the needful. A boy who yells loudly in my building's hallway at all hours and then asks me to donate money to his scout troop is no longer an annoyance; he is an excrescence -- "as pestilential a stripling as ever wore khaki shorts and went spooring or whatever it is that these Boy Scouts do." Unlike Lotus, I am apt to be quiet in crowds, and to dress more like a janitor than a film star -- but something like Lottie's oomph has revealed itself in my recent purchase of some zebra-print shoes and a dress trimmed in feathers.

I probably won't ever become Holden Caulfield or Lily Bart. (Well, who would want to?) But being a fan has changed the way I read. I've shifted from my adult, over-trained intellectualism back to my youthful preoccupation and playfulness. And this way, I think, is better. Or as Plum would say, here I am -- all boomps-a-daisy.

Recent Stories