The Kevin Spacey People

Part of me hopes that Kevin Spacey, wherever he is, will one day Google his own name and find this blog entry. As it is, I've made a promise to myself that, if I ever meet Kevin in person, I'll tell him the story I'm about to tell you.

Let me take you back in time to the summer of 2000. It was a very hard time for me; that was when my husband of six years decided to abandon me, leaving me alone and terrified. All I did that summer was sleep, take Xanax, and rent movies. Lots and lots of movies.

However, despite it being a crappy year for me, it was a very good year for Kevin Spacey; he was nominated for and won his second Academy Award for American Beauty. Prior to this, I had absolutely no opinion of the man. I thought he was an excellent actor, but that's about as far as it went. I certainly never meant to become involved in his personal life.

During that horrible summer, I also spent a lot of time on the internet, mostly in divorce support group forums. However one day I stumbled upon an American Beauty website, which linked directly to a Kevin Spacey tribute site. I was curious as to the content of this, so I went there.

The site was run (I later found out) by five middle-aged women that I eventually began to call, simply, The Kevin Spacey People. Two of them lived in Manhattan and were best friends and the "brains" of the operation. Their names were Alice and Susan. There was a third woman, Midge, who lived in Brooklyn and who practiced Wicca. A fourth woman, Charlotte, was from West Virginia, and the group was rounded out by Stella, who was from Chicago. These five women had a singular and very terrifying purpose--they were devoted to the cause of getting Kevin Spacey to have sex with them. All of them.

I was fascinated by this. For one thing, this was about the time that the rumors of Kevin's sexuality (or bisexuality, or homosexuality, or whatever) were flying about. Also, having just won the Oscar, Kevin was hot property (though his next movie was a complete piece of crap called Pay It Forward). This did not daunt the KS People. They were more determined than ever to get the poor man into bed.

Intrigued by this insanity, I infiltrated their group. I posted on their message board, pretending to also be a middle-aged woman in New York who was obsessed with Kevin. The fanatics welcomed me with open arms. Yes, I know this was deceitful and dishonest and manipulative, but I couldn't help myself. I was fascinated by the madness. And I was, you know, mentally unstable.

The first thing they did was send me (via regular mail) a copy of their collective erotic novel which featured Kevin and all five of them in...um...intimate circumstances. They alternated writing chapters. Not only was the novel bad as a piece of literature, it wasn't even good erotica--some of the bizarre sexual exploits seemed, to me, to be physically impossible. I began to think of all the famous people I had come in contact with during my years in theatre, and tried to think of someone who might actually know Kevin, so I could warn him about these people.

Midge the witch, in the meantime, spent several hours each day casting spells to try to get Kevin to fall in love with them. There was much candle-lighting and incense-burning. To my knowledge, none of this helped.

For Christmas that year, they sent me a mouse pad with Kevin's picture on it. A few weeks later, they sent me a tote bag with a collage of pictures of Kevin on it.

I was also invited to participate in a bizarre form of cyber-sex, in which one person would pretend to be Kevin while the rest of them did...things with him/her. I never actually did this, but one of them was kind enough to actually e-mail me the transcript. It was just...horrible. I sent it on to my best friend Andrew just so he could see what kind of lunacy I had fallen into, and he confirmed my belief that 85% of the actions performed by "Kevin" were not possible for a mortal man.

At around this time, there was a very famous website (now defunct) devoted entirely to celebrities and their private lives. Kevin had his own thread (as did just about every other actor you could possibly think of), but for some reason it seemed that the majority of the posters there hated Kevin for being "closeted" and for "not just coming out and admitting he was gay." Naturally, I told the KS People about this, and they went to the forum immediately and completely lost their minds.

Alice, who was pretty much of a bully, lied completely and said that she ("and several other women she knew") had actually had sex with Kevin, and therefore he couldn't be gay. This brought enormous repercussions on the part of the forum regulators, who out-and-out called Alice on her lie and managed to get her banned from the website altogether.

And then it was time for the Kev-In.

The Kev-In (yes, they really called it that) was the brainchild of the two Manhattanites, who arranged an elaborate weekend in the spring of 2001 during which all of us would get together in Central Park and, well, I'm not sure what we were meant to do. Talk about Kevin, apparently. After the "meeting", we would then progress to lunch at the Tribeca Grill, and following that, we would actually go to Kevin's apartment and try to see him. Yeah, that'll work.

Sadly, I could not attend the Kev-In, of course, because they would then find out I was only using their bizarre obsession for my own amusement. I came up with some excuse and demanded to see pictures, which Midge was only too happy to provide.

The two out-of-state women actually flew to New York in order to attend the Kev-In. Alice and Susan created an enormous banner proclaiming "Kev-In 2001". Everyone had picket-type signs with huge pictures of Kevin from various movies. And there they sat, in Central Park, for several hours.

Then there were dozens of pictures of Kevin's apartment building in Tribeca. I have no idea how they managed to find it, but they seemed to know exactly which one of the windows was his. They marched determinedly into the lobby, pretending to be tax accountants and insisted they must see Mr. Spacey immediately. Not being an idiot, the guard on duty sent them away. I assume that he figured out that tax accountants probably wouldn't be carrying around gigantic signs with Kevin's picture on them.

Not to be thwarted, the KS People resorted to throwing rocks at his window, trying to get his attention, until the guard came outside and threatened to have them arrested.

The final straw came on 9/11. I was frantically worried about the New York based KS People, so I sent them an e-mail asking if they were all right. Several hours later, I received a group e-mail from Alice to all of the KS People saying: "What we really need to be concentrating on, here, is this...how is all of this affecting Kevin?"

I gave up after that. But I know they're still out there, somewhere.

An interesting postscript to all of this is that in December of 2004, I actually saw Kevin Spacey, live, singing Bobby Darin songs in Atlantic City in order to promote Beyond The Sea. I had a front row seat, and at the end of his set, Kevin shook our hands. He seemed very nice.

I should have slipped him a note.

Next time: My friend Al!