Who is er mer gerd girl

On March 14, Reddit user xWavy posted a picture of an unidentified girl with the caption, "Just a book owners smile After moving swiftly up the Reddit threads, the image-caption combination moved on to meme-proving ground Derp , a site that was instrumental in the promotion of FAIL blog and "I Can Has Cheezburger? Throughout June the meme continued to spread, spawning its Tumblr ermahgerd , a "Berks" Quickmeme , the "Ermahgerd" meme generator and, of course, the obligatory Facebook page.

As its popularity grew, so did questions of the mysterious star's real identity. Would she reveal her true identity? Users compared the facial features of the young blonde in the post to the original happy-go-lucky book enthusiast.

The results were inconclusive, but the post reached the Reddit front page. Stine might've titled the story: It Came from Reddit! As it turns out, the meme-fame that comes with being the Ermahgerd Girl is not all photo opps and good berks. Goldenberger tells Vanity Fair that, while her friends love to reveal her ermahgerdness to pretty much everyone they meet, she is not always stoked to laugh at a bunch of iterations of a picture that was taken when she was about 11 years old.

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Becky Bartkowski is an award-winning journalist and the arts and music editor at New Times , where she writes about art, fashion, and pop culture. Contact: Becky Bartkowski. Follow: Twitter: beckybartkowski. Don't Miss Out. I mean obviously I am pretty damned funny. If you can find me a good paying job as a comedy writer, let me know. I've got a lot of hilarious ideas in my head.

In , Goosebumps author R. Stine was asked repeatedly for his thoughts on Ermahgerd. He seemed perplexed and annoyed, and worried that the meme was mocking his readers. In an interview that October for the National Book Festival he endured this exchange:. Stine: Yes. Interviewer: Will you pose for a picture with me wearing this Ermahgerd wig? Stine: No. No, I will not. Ermahgerd was a cognitive flashback for millennials—the most active demographic on the Internet—and their recollection of the 90s.

It was the same time-capsule effect that, in , contributed to the virality of a YouTube video of two siblings unwrapping a Nintendo 64 on Christmas Day —a home video that, Goldenberger thinks, was probably recorded within 12 months of the Ermahgerd picture being taken.

It captured the real, paroxysmal excitement of a little girl at precisely the right millisecond—the moment most unfortunate for her and most entertaining for us—to be rendered in Polaroid dye, scanned and preserved in pixels forever like a gargoyle of the Internet. When Maggie Goldenberger was in fourth or fifth grade, she and her friends seriously got into playing dress-up.

Goldenberger remembers the details of the very day that immortal photo was taken. Crucially, it was the Goosebumps books, with their instantly recognizable hyper-colored cover images by illustrator Tim Jacobus, that made the cut. Deciding against the coonskin cap, Goldenberger put on the vest, hoisted her hair up into intentionally dorky pigtails—she never wore them like that otherwise—brandished the chosen books, and pulled an intentionally hideous face for the camera.

Normally, she hardly ever wore her retainer like she was supposed to, but it felt right for the character: she put it on for the shoot. Kaelyn had the resulting Polaroid picture posted on her fridge door for many years.