beachgirl32fOG 2003

A Jersey Shore girl through and through, Cathy Foggotti arrived on eZabel in March 2003 after her friend delliott101 pointed her to the site, and she introduced herself the only way she knew how: by talking about gas prices, skiing in Vermont, and her congregation, all in one gloriously unpunctuated run-on sentence. At 31, she was self-consciously the oldest person in most threads, frequently noting her age as if applying for a senior discount at an amusement park. But that never stopped her from trying to crash every eZabel event she could get to — volleyball tournaments in Belmar, bowling nights, beach bonfires, go-karting — even when her unreliable car threatened to strand her on the Garden State Parkway. She attended the Point Pleasant Beach congregation, lived in Bricktown, and had a knack for connecting dots between people, always asking new members if they knew this family or that brother. Her closest eZabel friendship was with modestjesse, who lived just close enough that they actually managed to meet up in person, and she leaned on him as a confidant through surgeries and a long-distance courtship with a brother in Wisconsin. She also struck up easy rapport with perrin, trading stories about camping trips and Devils games, and with socalgal, who once teased her about being lured to events with promises of cute brothers — which, to be fair, was an effective strategy.

Cathy's posts read like someone talking at full speed with no intention of stopping for breath. She told vivid, rambling stories: the time her sisters threw a blanket over her and spun her into a cement wall, the seesaw accident that left a bone sticking out of her elbow at age twelve (the nurse bribed her with a milkshake from Bob Hoffman's), and the surprise housewarming party she almost missed because she was off helping with a quick-build in Turnersville. Her million-dollar wish list — travel the world, buy a motorcycle, get an apartment, pioneer — perfectly captured her mix of adventurousness and practicality. She had strong opinions about eggplant parmigiana preparation, ferrets (firmly anti-ferret after her sister's five wreaked havoc on an elderly woman), and people who wore Speedos to the beach. After a long absence from 2005 to 2008, she resurfaced as Cathy Fritts, now married and relocated to Milan, Michigan, where she self-deprecatingly called herself a country girl, mourned the lack of good iced coffee options, dreamed of buying a black Mazda 3 hatchback with a sunroof, and stretched her movie budget at the dollar theater in the mall.

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP — "The Shore Thing." Cathy was warmth without pretension, the kind of person who signed every message "chow" and never met a stranger she wouldn't ask about their congregation. She showed up older, unpolished, and utterly herself in a community of twentysomethings, and she made it work by never once pretending to be anything other than exactly who she was.