If you're looking to indulge in some good old fashioned celebrity schadenfreude, Tara Reid's Twitter isn't a bad place to start. I'll admit that when I first followed Tara, that's exactly what I was looking for, and she does not disappoint.
Tara Reid tweets like nobody's reading, including possibly her. Most of her thoughts seem to travel on an express train directly to her fingertips, making no local stops at coherence or context or even spell check. Punctuation does not exist in Taradise, nor does any evidence of self-censoring or filtering out the most benign feelings she encounters within.
Take for instance, this tweet, posted at 2:47pm on November 3: "Just came back fe eating the best breakfast burrito ever!" Ignore the fact that "from" is misspelled and that she ate a breakfast burrito at 2:47pm on a Monday, it's still the work of someone with a compulsion to share, even if that means sharing the least consequential information about the least significant topics. What made the breakfast burrito so great? Where did she get said breakfast burrito? Can we at least see a photo of it? Who knows, unclear and no, you cannot. Tara Reid just wanted you to know that she ate a great goddamn breakfast burrito and now she's back. Full stop. End scene.
That total lack of filter has a certain appeal. No, it's not a peek inside her world, like you might get from other celebrities on Twitter. It’' a peek inside her brain. You can laugh with her. You can cry with her. You can even invest with her.
You can also talk with her, or at least at her, and be pretty sure she's listening. Tara regularly interacts with her followers and seems to have a knee-jerk reaction to retweeting anyone who mentions her username, even when it's somewhat alarming. In that way, following Tara Reid on Twitter is also an up close and personal look at the very vocal, very affectionate and very loyal fanbase she's amassed over the course of her career.
Who exactly is a self-professed Tara Reid fan in 2014? It's a good question to pose some 15 years after American Pie was released. Let's be honest, while the ironic popularity of Sharknado may have thrust her back to the fringes of pop culture relevance, in the time between now and when she was riding high off of the success of American Pie, she's mostly been known for obliviously exposing herself on Diddy's red carpet, starring in one of the most cringe-inducing TMZ videos of all time and the spectacular booze-addled disaster that was her E! series Taradise. She's a long way from Lebowski.
And yet, there are her fans, lining up to wish her a happy birthday with intensely personal proclamations of love and generally showering her with praise.
It's easy to guess how Tara benefits from the love of her fans, a range of possibilities from the cynical—a self-esteem boost for a needy actress past her prime—to the optimistic—genuine gratitude for those who’ve stuck by her when the going got straight up unwatchable. But what do her fans get out of it, and what do they see in Tara that explains their adoration? I had to ask.
I reached out to a group of her most vocal supporters on Twitter and four agreed to talk to me about why they love Tara Reid. Their feelings were so sincere that I almost felt bad about following her for such snarky reasons. Luckily for me, Tara's God is not a vengeful one.
As you can see in my DM sessions with Tara’s biggest fans on Twitter above, it's the love for her fans, or at least the illusion of love, that goes a long way for her. For all of the things that Tara does wrong, like spell words, she's definitely doing some things right.
Steve Dool is a writer based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.
