violetboregaurdOG 2003

The username was almost Veruca Salt, but Lauren thought that was "too much of a throwback to the band." So she went with the other one — Violet Beauregarde, the gum-chewing competitor from Willy Wonka, a movie she considered "about SO much more than candy." That instinct — to pick the less obvious reference, the one with more texture — tells you most of what you need to know about Lauren Morgan from Piscataway, New Jersey. She was a graphic artist and commercial photographer who freelanced for screenprint companies, designing the art that ended up on band tees, radio station merch, and corporate uniforms. She wrote lyrics. She did theatre. She worked at a health food store for seven years and could recommend you the exact multivitamin brand worth taking. And she joined eZabel in December 2003, just in time to become one of its most emotionally vivid voices.

Her arrival came through the music scene — she'd been at a Taking Back Sunday show with punkprincess (Tina Morriale) when rocksupastar (Mike Schiano) recognized her and sent a message asking if she was "lauren, like tina's friend lauren." From there, she detonated. Four hundred and twenty comments in 2004 alone, across journals and forums, with the kind of emotional directness that made people trust her immediately. She didn't do irony as armor. When she told you something was awesome, she meant it. When she told you something was wrong, she meant that too — like the time she dismantled a commenter who'd been lecturing punkprincess about responsibility, ending with a surgical strike about how "all your viewpoints are easy to throw when you marry into money" and a correction of their spelling of "responsibility." Lauren could be warm and devastating in the same paragraph.

Music was not background noise for her — it was autobiography. She built mixed CDs like arguments, sequencing The Cure next to Janis Joplin next to Method Man and Mary J. Blige next to Brand New, each track mapped to a specific feeling or a specific drive down the Parkway. "Brand New saved me last summer," she wrote, and she wasn't being dramatic — she'd survived a bad car accident the summer before, one that left her with PTSD and depression, and the music became the scaffolding she rebuilt around. She could quote lyrics mid-conversation the way other people cited scripture, dropping Brand New's "I think in decimals and dollars" into a forum debate about love versus logic. She was raised on Central Jersey R&B and hip-hop — Notorious B.I.G. was the greatest rapper, Mary J. Blige was untouchable, she still believed Tupac was alive — but she'd become a total rocker, and her guilty pleasures ran to Broadway soundtracks: Jekyll & Hyde, Les Mis, Grease, Bette Midler. "Ah I feel better," she wrote after confessing that last one.

She moved to Pennsylvania for a stretch, waitressing and auxiliary pioneering in seldom-worked territory that she found genuinely transformative — "that was so phenomenal and there was so much to do when it came to territory and speaking to people." But New Jersey pulled her back, and so did the community. Her orbit on eZabel was wide: socalgal, fivezero, and juicymango were her top interaction partners, modestjesse (Jesse) was the friend who burned her Cure and 80s mix CDs and shared her Elliott Smith devotion, and aviator was the chaotic presence who ran the contest where she won JetBlue tickets — a minor eZabel legend. She gave career advice freely, once coaching socalgal on self-promotion campaigns and cover letters with the confidence of someone who'd landed her own interview that way. She defended friends with ferocity and told strangers in journal comments "if you need anything let me know — well we could introduce ourselves first." She was the person who told you the truth about your relationship while also acknowledging that "trying to talk to someone who is in love is like trying to stop a speeding train by standing in front of it."

And then there was Dan. She married skaorsk8 — Dan Hill, who also posted as superhero — and their partnership threaded quietly through everything. She bought him cologne with a message attached, plus tickets to see Something Corporate. She missed him when she traveled to Boston for a weekend. She referenced his advice in forum threads, agreeing with superhero's wisdom about moving on from heartbreak and adding her own experience. When planning their wedding, she held firm on no chicken dance and no hokey pokey — "I have been a bridesmaid one too many times and it's all ridiculous" — though her mom kept expanding the 150-person guest list beyond control. By 2006 she was in a cubicle somewhere, her boss of bosses walking in to ask for a wedding photo just as she was sneaking onto eZabel for the first time in months. Her last posts, in late 2007, carried the warmth of someone who'd grown up but hadn't forgotten: a journal comment about putting their German Shepherd to sleep, a Monday morning forum post pairing mini 3 Musketeers bars with Dire Straits lyrics, and a greeting that read like a homecoming — "I am taking back my day and stopping in the morning for a large Ezabel with cream and sugar."

eZabel Personality Type: ENFJ — "The Counselor." Lauren named her pet peeves with precision — bad teeth, people who answer questions meant for you, instigators, flaky people, kill joys — and those five items doubled as a map of her values: authenticity, directness, loyalty, follow-through, and the stubborn belief that people should let each other be happy. She was named after Lauren Bacall and Natalie Wood, her mom's favorite old-movie actresses, and she carried that same quality of being somehow timeless — expressive without being performative, emotionally generous without being naive, and always, always paying attention to the composition.