By Nick Meyers, Contributing Writer
A typical American male fantasy often involves him graciously sweeping some Hollywood starlet off of her feet and into a love-laden life. Bill Kelley, professor of music, took the work out of it on www.heatherlovesbill.com. He made people believe Heather Graham is obsessed with and stalking him.
Created as a joke, www.heatherlovesbill.com fictionally chronicles Heather Graham’s introduction to the Internet and Photoshop. On her first Ebay bid, she discovered a high school picture of our own Bill Kelley. From there, her obsession began.
Though she has discovered Kelley is married, her mission has not been deterred.
Kelley started the site at his previous job and kept it going to see what would happen. As he and some of his co-workers took a smoke break, they discussed the ridiculous possibilities of what the page could become.
“I had a girl in the office write up some doodling like kids do in grade school, saying ‘I love Bill’ and ‘Heather Graham Kelley’ and turned them into wallpapers,” Kelley said.
The site won www.cruel.com’s “Site of the Day” on April 2 and has since increased its traffic by some 17,000 users.
“It went from 10 hits to 17,000 in about two weeks,” Kelley said. “It actually got around 8,000 hits on April 2, and then kept going at about 1,000 hits a day.”
Kelley said the site has begun to function in many different ways.
“There are many complexities in it,” Kelley said. “On one hand, it’s a promotional tool for my other Web site and the recording studio. But it’s also a sociological study because all of these men write in trying to lure her into writing back specifically to them.”
The feedback written to Heather Graham has ranged from helpful suggestions for Photoshop to offers of phone numbers from Bill Kelley look-alikes.
“One guy in Canada wrote saying his friend looked like me, and he was a composer, too,” Kelley said. “He offered his friend’s number, but I don’t think Heather would settle for anything less than the real me.”