red, white and OH MY GOODNESS!

Everyone gets naked. You, me, Bea Arthur. Some people get naked and dance around. A few get paid for it. And a couple of people even get naked and pose for pictures.

Punky Brewster is not one of those people.

What was a completely harmless entry on my blog has turned into a bizarre world-wide phenomena. Due to a few simple words I wrote in an entry, people are searching my website in the hopes of finding pornography. In turn, this has taught me a lot about blogging and the internet.

I want to read 100 books this year, that's my goal. To help me keep track of them, and to make failure that much more embarrassing, I went public with my goal and started a blog called "Red, White and Esoteric." To begin with, a few of my friends and family subscribed to it, then word got around, and I noticed my entries were getting more hits. (More meaning eight, instead of three.) I was curious about this trend, so my friend Josh hooked me up with a site called Feedburner.com. It tells you all kinds of statistics on your blog, like how many hits your site gets in an hour, what pages get looked at the most, where in the world people are looking at them from and how people arrived at your blog. In the beginning, my site got a few dozen hits a day, things like people searching for "Gabriel Garcia Marquez" and then linking to a review I had done of "The General in His Labyrinth."

One day I wrote an entry mentioning that as a child I had written to Soleil Moon Frye, better known as television character Punky Brewster. A week later I noticed that someone in Michigan had stumbled upon my entry after typing in "naked punky brewster pictures." What?! Someone was trying to look at Punky naked! That's crazy! Who would want to do that? I imagined some greasy-haired guy with glasses and bad acne, wearing a "Save a Tree, Eat a Beaver" t-shirt, leaning over his keyboard and hoping his search paid off. Just some random freak.

Still, it amused me. I showed it to all my friends. I also wrote a new entry about it, entitled "Ok, who's the pervert?" I even added a link that said if you clicked on it, you would be taken to a page with naked pictures of Punky. When you do click on it, however, it just tells you you're a pervert.

This entry was magic. The next time I logged onto Feedburner, my blog traffic had spiked like crazy. The "pervert" entry alone was getting dozens of hits a day. All it took was the magic words "punky brewster naked." Apparently, seeing Punky naked is a worldwide quest. There was traffic from Bombay, London, Berlin, Dubai, Bejing, all over. Seeing Punky in the buff is a universal goal.

I understand that famous people without clothing are curiosities. Do they look like regular people? I remember peeking with my friend at her dad's Playboy once, the one with Denise Crosby on the cover, because Tasha Yar was our favorite on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." I just thought she looked tan. And silly. It made it appear as though famous people wear a party hat and streamers when they can't locate their clothes.

I also learned there are a million ways to ask to see Soleil naked. "Punky naked," "naked punky brewster," "naked punky pics," "naked soliel moon frye," "punky brewster nude," just to name a few. I hope they want to see her naked now, in her early 30s, as opposed to back on the Punky Brewster show, when she was eight. My blog is now the first site to appear if you google the words "naked punky brewster pictures." In the whole world. While it is strange, I just like to say it. Number one in the whole world!

With the help of my friend Josh, I have learned to capitalize on the world's need for smut. I now try to include several phrases on my blog that could accidentally be construed as pornography if taken out of context and used in a search. Things like "I suck at playing tennis," or "in the back of my mind, I've had this idea for an entry." My site now gets hundreds of hits a day from people searching for porn. I don't mind. Maybe they'll be inspired to pick up a book whenever they finish what it is they're doing.

Oh, and for the record, there are no photos of Punky Brewster completely naked. I checked. She did some for Maxim in her underwear, but that's about it. I imagine some day, if Soleil Moon Frye does pose naked, she'll be wearing pigtails and a bandana around one thigh. I'll be sure to link to it from my blog.

-The Wire, June 6, 2007