Tapping Into the Brenda in All of Us

The crowd was down in at least one nightclub Saturday night as hundreds of young groovers and couch potatoes gathered a few zones east of 90210 at the Park Plaza Hotel for the Brenda Party, a love/hate fest in honor of that putatively abrasive and unsavory character, Brenda, played by Shannen Doherty on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” The bash was thrown by Ben Is Dead magazine and the bile-slinging I Hate Brenda Newsletter.

They came “to celebrate the Brenda that’s in everybody,” according to Ben Is Dead and IHB co-editor Kerin Morataya. While she allows that Brenda is “a many-faceted thing,” some of the qualities celebrated that evening were “bitchiness, politics and bad taste in music.”

A knot of fiercely pro-Brenda demonstrators stood outside waving “We Brenda” signs. Some distributed their own poison-pen broadside that slung bile back at the Brenda newsletter editors.

They were there “to talk out against all the prejudice against Brenda,” said a pro-Brenda protester who calls herself Puka. “It’s not her fault she was involved in a relationship in which her best friend and her boyfriend nooked behind her back.”

Party-goers were asked to dress as their favorite 90210 character, and prizes were awarded to the best look-alikes. Brendas dominated with Dylans running a close second. The sex of the guest seldom determined the sex of the character chosen. “I wanted to meet some cool babes tonight,” claimed Lainie Siegel, a female Dylan impostor with painted-on sideburns.

Among the sights were two Brendas, a Dylan, an Andrea and a Donna who tangled limbs and fabrics in an every-character-for-him/herself wrestling match. Other entertainment was a bizarre multicultural mix of musical styles that included a ‘Yiddish-core” rock and roll band and the Latin American singing drag queens, Cholita!