Here's a weird one. A year or three ago when GMail was launched, I signed up for a GMail account with my name…and it occurred to me that it might be handy to have a whole bunch of GMail accounts under a mess of names. They were free and I thought I might route my spam to one of them and use another to filter certain messages and reroute them. When I go on all these weird political message boards, I sometimes have to sign up in order to read things and rather than leave my own e-mail address, thereby bringing on waves of penis enlargement ads, I could sign up with one of my GMail addresses. So I got a whole bunch of them and for most, I used the name of obscure comedians and character actors. For instance, one of my favorite film comics was a gent named Charley Chase…so I signed up for charleychase at gmail.com. (I am not typing the name with the "@" sign because that makes it vulnerable to bots and spiders that comb websites looking for e-mail addresses to add to spam mailing lists.)
And then I never got around to using that address for anything. I went a year or three without logging into it and I certainly never sent any e-mail its way, nor did I do anything that would cause anyone else to send e-mail to it. The other day, I logged in and found it was full of messages that had accumulated there over the last few years…messages that sat there, unread and unanswered.
I thought at first it was all spam but on closer examination, very few of them were. They were mostly real messages, some of which described how much the sender had so enjoyed having sex with the addressee. A number were flight itineraries for a woman whose name I did not recognize. There were about a dozen messages from 1-800-flowers.com discussing its repeated and failed attempts to deliver a basket of posies to Charley Chase. I kept wondering, "Why did these people send these messages to this address?" And then I came across one that was the planned shooting schedule for a movie called Party of Feet 2 and asking the recipient to fax or e-mail her "latest test" and that's when I figured it out.
There is a very popular actress who appears in sex films under the name Charley Chase. For some time now, fans and business associates have been writing to her at that address, thinking it's hers. I'm guessing she probably has a GMail account that is that name plus a number or something else…and they've been accidentally leaving off the number or something else. Anyway, I've been getting a lot of her mail and I've been trying to decide what to do about this.
My first thought was to find some way to contact the lady and turn the email address over to her, mail and all. My second thought was not to. After all, she usurped the name of one of my favorite comedians and made it impossible to Google images of him without seeing a lot of photos that would make Larry Flynt blush. But then my third thought was to go back to my first thought. When she started out, she may not have known there was ever a rather popular actor named Charley Chase…and if she does by now, it's too late for her to change her nom de porn. So, no sexual suggestion intended, I'd like to give it to her.
I'm sending messages to her Facebook account and her Twitter account and directing her to this message of explanation. Charley, if you're reading this, I do not want anything from you except to make sure that I'm turning over the account to the lady who actually performs under the name of Charley Chase. That is the only way you have to satisfy me to get it.