While looking through the statistics for this website this morning, I noticed a number of visitors coming from a URL I didn’t recognize, and when I went and checked it out there was a lovely mention of my project and a link. The interesting thing was, the person who writes this great blog thought I was male, and, likewise, I assumed from the sweet baby shoes at the top of the blog that it was a female. In fact it’s a fellow named Tom. Of course, first suspicion would be that Tom didn’t see that my name is Bambi (because it’s only in one spot and buried deep), but that’s not necessarily the case…

A few years ago, during that blissful downtime just after Christmas, I clicked my way to ebay and, on a whim, entered “vintage bambi”, just to see what might pop up. As luck would have it, a number of silvered prints from the Disney studio were listed—apparently these were copies from the original paintings, and used under the cels as a guide (if anyone has more information on the process I would love to hear it). The prints were listed by a person named Lin in Los Angeles, whose neighbour—an avid garage sale junkie for many years—had recently passed away. While cleaning out the neighbour’s garage Lin discovered these prints, bearing the Disney studio stamps and 1942 dates, and decided they should find homes. The listings were so charmingly weird—long, rambling descriptions with tons of misused capitals and strange characters—and I was immediately as intrigued by the person listing the items as I was by the prints themselves. Of course an initial question was one of gender—Lin, male or female? Because I was in Canada I had to send Lin an email to make sure he/she would ship to me, and so we had some interesting exchanges leading up to the auction. Lin was clearly crazy (in a good way) and would write these hilarious run-on emails—by now I had also drawn my sister into the debate on Lin’s gender. I managed to snag six of the prints, and when they arrived they were in about seven layers of packaging: plastic sleeve in plastic folder with a taped-together pair of cardboard sheets, in paper folder, tape wrapped around a dozen times, in a paper envelope, with an elastic around it, in a bubble envelope inside a box. That may be more than seven, actually. The box was also madly wrapped in tape, and Lin’s handwriting was as absurd as I had imagined, which set my sister and I to wondering once again, would a man be more likely to package things this way? Does this writing look like a woman’s? I never found out for sure, at least not then—but in my head Lin had leaned toward female. I pictured her with many cats and wiry red hair.

Several months later I received an email from Lin—it said that another person whose real name was Bambi (I have never met another) had also won a few of the Bambi prints in the auction, and Lin had told this other Bambi, a man from Australia, about me. I couldn’t believe it—the only way to get more ribbing for my name is to be a GUY saddled with it. Lin asked if he/she could pass on my email, and I said certainly. So I receive an email from this other Bambi, who happens to work for a software company that makes a system I was being trained on that very week. The email says that this other Bambi was curious to make contact with someone bearing the same name across the world, and couldn’t believe that there was a man in Canada named Bambi. Now I was confused. I wrote back, saying “wait, I am female, what are you??” Turns out that Bambi is female as well, yet somehow Lin had gotten the impression we were both male. So, I asked if she knew whether Lin was a man or woman, and she had been having the same debate. I knew Lin would get a kick out of the whole fiasco, so I wrote to her, and told of the gender-bender exchange, to which Lin replied he was in fact a man, but, and I quote, “a gay man, and furthermore an ex-hippie.”

Interesting how difficult it can be to determine gender just by writings and drawings, when names don’t make it obvious. It’s actually a fantastic discovery, in my opinion—and my tomboy younger self would certainly have been thrilled to be thought a dude by members of the e-world at large.

One more interesting bit to this story: the other Bambi, who is ten years older than I, worked for said software company, which had just been bought out by a larger corporation. She was sent to San Francisco where the key players would get a chance to meet, and found herself in a conference room with a dozen other people, one of whom was also from Australia. Also named Bambi. Born the same year, mothers born the same day, and—get this—both had two children with the SAME NAMES. Bizarre. Being a Bambi appears to be somewhat like being a twin separated at birth. Perhaps somewhere nearby sits another Bambi, finishing his/her daily drawing, sipping vanilla tea, putting off doing the dishes and half-watching an old episode of Boston Legal.

What a loser.