Dude!

Almost five years ago, Apple ran a campaign of "Switcher" commercials, with supposed real-life stories of people who had bad experiences with Windows and switched to using Macs. The most famous of these featured then 14-year old Ellen Feiss, the "stoned" girl in my icon. Feiss was a friend of the commercial producer's son, and was thrust in front of the camera at the last moment while she was visiting his house. According to Feiss, she was tired from school and had taken a lot of allergy medication. Because of her red eyes and loopy mannerisms, viewers suspected she might have been on something stronger than Benadryl.

Now in college, a Mac publication tracked her down and got her to give an interview, in which she swears that she was in fact sober that day (although she has used pot since then), that her story of losing her term paper on a PC was real, and that she's still using the same Mac she had back then today.

Feiss goes to to explain how Apple was so concerned that people might identify them with drug use based on her appearance (the preferred platform for musicians and artists associated with drug use?!) that they approached her and asked that she refrain from doing any publicity or further acting, and that she please fade quietly into obscurity. Feiss credits creepy obsessed internet fans with keeping her in the limelight. One movie producer tricked her high school into giving her home phone number to him, so he could recruit her for his film about shroom-trippers vacationing in France.

Although her reasoning for doing the interview was to put to rest rumors about her drug use, now that her fellow students have Googled her and discovered her past, her answers to questions about her personal life have sparked a new controversy about whether she is in fact a lesbian or not. Her creepy basement-lurking fanbase is appalled at the thought that, now a hot legal redhead coed, she won't run away with them now simply because she may prefer to chew the shag carpeting.