Chief among them is that I can no longer find “The Webster Home Page”.
What is “The Webster Home Page”, you ask?
Back in the early days of the internet, I stumbled upon a poorly made Geocities website titled “The Webster Home Page”.
In case you’re wondering who/what Webster is, in this case, Webster is Emmanuel Lewis.
Just the fact that somebody would name a fan page after a fictional character played by an actor, when they were clearly intending to pay tribute to the actor himself was enough to make me giggle.
Not to mention stating that it’s the “home page” of said fictional character. That’s rather presumptious, I think.
But the best part of this whole thing is the lone, grainy, color picture of Emmanuel Lewish riding on a float in a random, unidentified parade, waving to the crowd. It looks as if it was shot by the author himself. This was clearly not a publicity still taken from somewhere else. It looked like the Zapruder film.
And under the photo, the caption read, “This picture reminds me of his childlike spirit.”
That was pretty much it for the whole “The Webster Home Page”. I think there may have been one of those cheesy hit counters at the bottom. It was probably on 150 or something and I would guess 140 of those visits were mine.
But it’s gone now.
I remember saving the picture, but I can’t find it.
It really does drive me crazy. I mean, Henry Darger wrote a 15,000 page book because he lost a picture he had clipped out of a newspaper. I’m not saying it has driven me that crazy, but I do get the feeling people think I just made this whole thing up.
OK, I will go on record and say that the loss of “The Webster Home Page” haunts me. I think that’s a good way to put it.
I know that the chances of someone reading this and going, “Oh shit, I remember that! I totally have that picture, I’ll send it to Eric!” is right around the same odds of winning the lottery at the exact moment you are also getting struck by lightning and attacked by a shark, but I figured I’d put it out there.
6 responses so far ↓
Ern2150 // March 9, 2009 at 12:12 am |
Archive.org might be able to help — any idea of the original URL or how you got there or other details?
Carol Hiller // March 9, 2009 at 2:34 am |
Carol Hiller // March 9, 2009 at 2:35 am |
since wordpress doesn’t do HTML in its comments, here you go, I’ll spell it out:
http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g105/caroldiego/webstersharklightning.jpg
Kate // March 10, 2009 at 9:59 am |
sublime Ms. Hiller
wow, I would have subscribed had I known! I was just content with Mad magazine’s cover of Webster. sigh.
Eric T // April 24, 2009 at 7:44 am |
here- is this it? It took me 5 seconds of searching… Hope its the right one… I mean, how many floats could he have been on?
http://www.x-entertainment.com/thanksgiving/macyparade/1987/45.jpg
hollywoodphony // April 24, 2009 at 10:45 am |
Eric T, this is gonna sound crazy, but that’s actually not it. This was him sitting on the front lip of a large float, waving to the crowd. But more importantly, it was somebody’s picture they had taken themself, not a screen grab from TV. Like this guy was sitting there, waiting for Webster to come by so he could snap a pic. I got the feeling it was the biggest accomplishment of his life. And also that if anything had happened to that little guy, it would have been evidence. Thanks for trying though!