The Web Site of R. Scott Barrons, Ph.D.
by Cheryl "Tashi" Costa

As a theatrical artist, the original idea came to me in back in 1998. The idea was to create this massive research web site and perhaps a cable television documentary built around the premise of some person who grew up earlier in the 20th century and had this strange mystery grow up around him or her.

Her name was to be Katharine Marie Kingsbury; she was to be born about 1916. She was the daughter of Baltimore doctor Thomas Kingsbury and his wife Martha. She was a bright student and went to nursing school and joined the Army nursing corps just before WWII. In 1942 while working as a research assistant at the Fort Dietrich in Maryland, Lt. Kingsbury became infected with an experimental virus along with four other Army medical research personnel. The infection very nearly killed them all, but they all survived. The four men were eager to get into the war and were allowed to volunteer for war theater assignments. Kathy remained at Fort Dietrich until after the war. It wasn't until the late 1950's that it was discovered that Col. Kingsbury, MD, hadn't aged a day since 1942, in essence had she had the appearance of still being 25 years old. In the late 1990s a grants specialist for a university came across grant documentation that suggested that a Miss Kingsbury was very active in virus research. Only there are problems with the paperwork and the documentation -- how could a woman apparently 25 years old have a resume that spanned 40 years? He smells fraud and begins to research and finds a mystery.

My storytelling method was going to be using a multi-generational actors to stage the period pictures and create the illusion of current day elder friends and witnesses of the woman they knew called Kathy Kingsbury. As I mentioned before, the intention was to produce a research website from the perspective of an independent researcher trying to get to the bottom of it all. Of course we were going to produce a cable access documentary to generate rumors, urban legend and interest in the web site. Then "The Blair Witch Project" came out and the idea of a mock documentary became passé for the immediate future and so I went on to other theater projects.

Then in the spring of 2001, a gal pal introduced me to the 1936:Horror Live Role-playing Campaign. She showed me artifacts that she had purchased for her male character. After talking with her and several of her friends and looking over the www.vialarp.org web site I saw this awesome potential to create a specialty theme motif web site. The idea being a 21st century researcher who was in possession of the personal papers and artifacts of some individual who lived an adventurous life in that golden age of the late 1930s.

I started with a character name I had bouncing around in my head called Remington Scott Barrons, Jr. I went to the www.vialarp.org/1936 site and began filling out a character registration form. The process of developing a character for the LARP was certainly more difficult than characters I had written for the stage. So I was forced to sit down and start researching "history" in order to build this guy. I knew absolutely nothing about the 1930s, other than the fact that they had had a depression and my parents lived through it. I immersed myself in adventure movies from that era, both modern and any that I could find on Turner Classic Movies. After a bit of research, I wrote a 5000-word narrative story about Scott and where his dad and mother came from and where he grew up.

Of course, my eighth grade English teacher once told me to "write what you know." Again here I was without any practical knowledge, so it started simply enough with me dressing in Scott's clothes and attending a between-game-event in a local restaurant with a bunch of the 1936 players. I was overwhelmed that first night when I came home and wrote an email note in the form of a journal entry. That was the beginning of the Barrons Chronicles web site.

Please let me state for the record that the 1936:Horror Universe belongs to Gordon Olmstead-Dean & Adrienne Amerman and they have graciously let me play in their garden. The Adventures of Scott Barrons are an independent work of fiction written by me, with significant intellectual and appearance contributions from the players of the 1936:Horror Campaign.

The Barrons Chronicle site is for all intents and purposes a web novel and a web theme park all rolled into one. The idea behind it is to give the web surfer the experience of thinking that the site is indeed real, that perhaps Dr. Barrons really existed and did all these things that are credited to him and his friends. Like the LARP campaign authors I worked very hard to weave Scott's life and adventures into the fabric of real history.

I created his resume, his journals, letters, and telegrams, all documents apparently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and as LARP events occurred I staged photos and doctored them to appear real and in period. I even created Scott's obituary. First as a tool to look back retrospectively at his life, to get a handle on what impact the adventure years of the mid- to late-1930s had on his life in the grand scheme of things, as it were. Second, the obituary had the effect of convincing real people and unsuspecting web surfers that these journals and documents were real, "…'cause there's the guy's obit!" Again it played into the theme park tradition -- people like motif environments, so why not in the form of a web novel?

So it started with a rumor that I as a playwright was researching a real guy who had a life something like Dr. Indiana Jones from the movies. The web server report began getting hits, and more hits and gradually the site hits grew from 150 hits a week to nearly 4000 and as many as 10000 on weeks when I post new documents and photos.

We in the LARP community love to live these adventures. I have come to find that there are plenty of people out there who may never experience a LARP event, but they certainly like living it vicariously through us. In addition there are certainly a lot of people out there who like reading other peoples' journals and diaries.

Some of the comments I get frequently from non-LARPers who read the site are on the historical detail that I put into the writing. The other compliment I get, and it's really owed to the bigger 1936 community of players that I share the game with, is: "You people sure go to a lot of trouble to make it all look right in the photographs."

This is a compliment to the fact that we as LARPers do work hard to get it right and the GMs and their cast and tech crews get it right too.

The down side is to the amount of effort it takes.

Yes, it takes a ton of research. It's a 2nd job to perform the research, write and produce the graphic elements that makes a living LARP artifact web site flourish. Another "down" side: I have had several people, mostly teachers and university professors, contact me and ask that I put a disclaimer on the site because in some cases their students were quoting the accounts of our hero, Dr. R. Scott Barrons, as historical fact.

For example, there was the Hindenburg Disaster, which Scott survived after a zombie ran amok on board and the German crew had to self-destruct the airship to stop the monster from getting loose on the New Jersey countryside. Then there was Scott's account of what happened in the Spanish Civil war. Not to mention the contributions that Dr. Barrons made in the world of transistor and microwave research, years ahead of Bell Labs. To all of these entertainment and literary fibs I say, "Teachers, tell your students to check their facts with other sources called books."

But they were right, something was needed, both to honor the players who portray these characters from which some of the inspiring interaction is gleaned, and to provide some simple evidence that the site is theatrical in nature. To do this I added a cast list link next to the copyright notice on the home page of the site.

http://www.cherylcosta.com/index-rsbarrons.html

In closing, I can only say that as a LARP-based web theme park this project has been a nice success. It has been fun to read, fun to experience and from the perspective of the people whose characters and stories helped make it happen, it was fun to be part of. From my point of view the success of the project is a fitting tribute to the scientist, hero, patriot and adventurer Scott Barrons -- the man who never was!