Today, Vanity Fair truly outdid themselves in the way of ‘ engaging celebrity profiles’. Rather than focus on the Kardashian/Swift/Beyoncé glitterati (as wonderful as they are), they chose to tell the story of a true hero: Maggie Goldenberger.
You may know her better as…
… ERMAHGERD GERL.
In the piece, Vanity Fair spoke to Maggie about her transition into a life of memehood, and how she feels about being a true icon of the Internet age.
She had no idea the original image (‘ERMAHGERD, GERSBERMPS‘) had been created until a friend called her and informed her, while she was travelling in India. She turned on her computer and discovered that she was no longer 23 year old nurse from Phoenix, she was now ~only meme~. The virality of the image was already too far gone, and there was no way to get her life as a normal woman back.
Before she knew it, her friends were introducing her as ‘Berk’ to everyone they knew, there was an ‘ermahgerd’ online translator, there was an entire section on Etsy dedicated to her face, and she was walking past people who dressed up as her on Halloween.
“I just can’t believe this is my 15 minutes of fame—I was hoping it would come in another form. But I guess you have to take what you can get,” she said to VF.
By far the most bizarre part of the article, is the conspiracy theory that Goldenberger should have seen her descent into memehood coming, due to the fact that Goosebumps #4 (‘Say Cheese and Die’) is about a camera that captures terrifying things that haven’t happened yet… which is, at a stretch, sorta, kinda, what happened to her.
Not that Maggie would know though. She wasn’t even a huge Goosebumps fan as a kid: “There were a couple I really enjoyed, but . . . I was not an avid Goosebumps reader,” she said. “I wish I could say I was a die-hard fan?”
But w/e. All we want to do now is revisit how bloody good the ~ERMAGHERD~ meme was – SERRY NOT SERRY, MERGIE.
MERSHED PERTERTERS!
SHEERK WERK!
PERGS!
PERP TERTS!
HERRY PERTER!
And then, of course, we all went too far and we kooked it:
Okay, fine, we’re done.
If you wanna read the thorough, interesting, eloquent Vanity Fair profile, you can do that here: vanityfair.com/culture/2015/10/ermahgerd-girl-true-story
Image & story via Vanity Fair.
