Meme Celebrities
Ermahgerd: the girl with the Goosebumps books
Two friends with a Polaroid camera staged a nerdy photo shoot in the late 1990s. Thirteen years later it gave the internet a whole new way of talking.
Around 1998, when she was about ten, Maggie Goldenberger and her best friend Kaelyn liked to dress up and take silly Polaroids. For one of them Maggie put her hair in pigtails, put in her retainer and posed with an armful of Goosebumps books, pulling the most excited face she could.
Gersberms
In March 2012 the photo appeared on Reddit with a caption written the way someone with a retainer might say it: “GERSBERMS - MAH FRAVRIT BERKS”. Ermahgerd - “oh my god” - spread instantly, and soon people were translating everything from song lyrics to film titles into retainer-speak.
Ermahgerd: Ermahgerd is a childhood photo of a girl with braces and a ponytail, holding up Goosebumps books with a huge, excited grin.
Finding out from the other side of the world
Goldenberger was 25 and backpacking in India when friends told her that her childhood photo had gone viral. At first she wanted nothing to do with it. Over time she came to enjoy it - it was a joke she had made herself, after all. Today she works as a nurse in Arizona, and says she really does enjoy being the Ermahgerd girl.
Watch her tell it
I Accidentally Became A Meme: Ermahgerd (BuzzFeedVideo, YouTube)
How I Became the Ermahgerd Gersberms Girl | Meet the Meme (Know Your Meme, YouTube)
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