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 While
at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas I was talking with Bill Margold
at the Free Speech Coalition booth. I happened to mention I was off to do an interview
and Bill said, "Why don't you interview Danni Ashe? She INVENTED the Internet
and she's right next door!" Danni was signing in the next booth with
Anna Malle and Christi Lake. I spoke with her briefly and arranged to meet back
in L.A. when the convention was over.
Monday January 24, 2000: In a few minutes Danni came out and gave me a tour of her facility. In spite of her being dressed casually and wearing no makeup, she was petite, voluptuous and strikingly beautiful! I also found her to be articulate with obvious business savvy. She took me through the office area, the studios where the live feeds are shot, told me about the [then] upcoming Boob Bowl (related story) and other ventures, ending the tour in a conference room with pictures, articles and framed memorabilia on the walls. When Danni went out to get us something to drink I had a chance to look around and found there were articles about her from the Wall Street Journal, magazine covers, and artwork around the room.
Danni: Yes! I mentioned it in a couple of interviews and the author of the book apparently started getting calls from people saying Danni's talking about you're book, so he wrote to me and said how excited he was to hear [I was using it] and sent me an autographed copy. AINews: That's fantastic! Danni: Yes, he was very nice about it. AINews: How did you get the idea for "Danni's Hard Drive"? Danni: It sort of came about when I got onto the Internet in early 1995. I had several bad experiences as a feature dancer and it was time to make a change. I was planning on taking a computer programming class at the Computer Learning Center, and fortunately for me I had some time to kill. I kept hearing about the about the Internet and I didn't understand what it was. I had some time to kill it so I went out and bought software and some books, and got online with Netcom Net Cruiser. I had also been hearing my pictures were all over the newsgroups, so I wanted to check that out as well. When I got online I straight away went to the newsgroups because at the time in early '95 the newsgroups were a dynamic place to be. It just made sense. I really got sucked in talking to people and interacting with people on alt.sex.breast and alt.sex.movies. And I remember the first time clicked on that little icon to go to the Web the link didn't go anywhere. My modem was just too slow so it really didn't work. So to me the Internet really was Usenet. The Web really didn't compute at that time. It wasn't until I had been on Usenet for a few months that people started saying, "Gee Danni, you should have a Web Site! It would be really cool if you had a website" and I'm going "Nah", You know? "The Web doesn't work and I don't like it." Then one day my husband came home and installed a faster modem and loaded up his company's new website and said, "Come over here, you've got to look at this." All of a sudden I saw how worked, what hypertext really meant, and the proverbial light bulb goes off and I said, "Oh my God! I've gotta have one of these!" It was instant! I could see the structure in my mind. I knew exactly what my website was gonna be and what it would mean and didn't know how I was gonna do it but I knew what I wanted. AINews: Wow! You saw that all at once? Danni: Yes, it was, "Wow!" All of a sudden it all really made sense and I thought I know what I can do with this! So I hired the programmers that had built my husband's company's website. I remember telling them, "Listen, if you do the programming I'll put together all the content and everything, and we will do a 50-50 [split]" and they looked at me and they went, "You know we'd rather be paid." (Laughs!) I know they're kicking themselves for that now! But they charged me $900 to build the website. So I paid the $900 and after a few weeks I realized I really wasn't getting what I wanted. AINews: What year was that? Danni: This was still early '95, the spring of 95. I had such a clear vision in my head of how it was supposed to flow and how it was supposed to work. Where the links should be and the structure was just 3-D floating around my head! I knew what it had to be and I couldn't communicate it to these programmers. So I fired them and I hired another guy. He was a little bit better, but it still just wasn't getting where I wanted to go. In the meantime I'm still on the Usenet just talking to people like crazy building this huge network of friends online and they're saying, "Danni you can do it! It's easy!" So I was about to go on vacation in the Bahamas and I thought, "Well, I'll just do this myself, I'm fed up!" So I bought the "HTML Manual of Style" to learn form and function, and I bought [Nicholas] Negroponte's "Being Digital" for inspiration. I went to the Bahamas and read the books and when I got back I finished the site in a couple of weeks and that's when it was launched. Actually I did all the programming myself for the first year. I didn't hire a Webmaster until July of '96. AINews: Is that when it got too busy for you? Danni: Yes, in the beginning I literally did everything. I did the Web design and graphics. They were terrible but I did them. I built all my own accounting systems, I built my own databases, and I literally had my fingers on everything. And as the business started to grow and I just couldn't keep a handle on all that, I just had to start learning how to delegate, which was the hardest thing that I ever had to do because I'm a real control freak. I like to know where all the pieces are and to give up something and trust in someone to do it right was really, really hard. AINews: What did you write your databases in? Danni: Q&A. It's a really easy database program. AINews: I read somewhere that you were arrested while you were on the road [touring]. Danni: I was arrested in Jacksonville FL. That was the real catalyst. That's when I knew that road dancing was not my future. I had a lot of bad experience on the road in my brief time out, but Jacksonville was the worst. When I took the booking I was on the phone with the owner and he said, "Here's what I want you to do. I want you to wear bikinis under your costumes and I want you to fall out of your bikini but you've got to keep the bikini on, but we want you to fall out of it." I'm thinking, "Okay, I got all these elaborate costumes. How am I gonna do this?" So I spend days to try and find bikinis that will work underneath all of these elaborate costumes. Couldn't find anything. So I got to the club and I said to the manager, "Look, you guys have a choice. I can either wear my costumes like I normally do and strip down to a G-string and top, and fall out of those, or I can go out in a bikini, what do you want?" and he said, "What?" Then he said "Just go nude, don't worry about it. Just go do your show like you always do them." AINews: This was not a nude club, though. Danni: No. I was naive and trusting in what these guys were telling me. He said just go nude! So on one hand I had been told I need to wear a bikini but I can fall out of it, and the other guy was saying that it was okay to go nude. So in retrospect large bells should have been going off in my head and I should have been concerned, but I wasn't. And another thing, I brought this softcore striptease video of myself and I said, "Can I sell these?" And he said, "Oh, yeah! Our guys LOVE videos! You'll sell all of them!" And he was right; I sold all of them. All my videos were gone within two days. I was doing really well selling a lot of Polaroid's and having a great week. A lot of fans were coming in from Georgia and other places, and on the last night I'm on my third show or something. All of a sudden this guy jumps up and takes a picture of me. I had just taken my top off. Actually I wasn't going nude, I was going topless, I remember, because I was a little nervous about what they were doing, you know? I wasn't sure. So I was only going topless. I took my top off, this guy takes a picture of me, and I'm all, "Gosh, why didn't he wait until after my show? Why did he do that?" All of a sudden all the lights go on, and the same guy stands up and with his camera and it's like, "Click! Click! Click! Click! Click!" He takes all these pictures! And I'm standing there with my top off on-stage and there's 13 police officers from three different jurisdictions and they all have cameras in their hats and had been staking out the place for days. And the first thing the arresting officer said was, "Are you aware of the fact that your videos are illegal in this county?" And I thought, "Oh my God!" So I got arrested for selling "bad" videos. And these were striptease tapes, they were really softcore stuff, and for baring my breasts in public, and my ass - you're supposed to wear full bottoms - supposed to have your entire ass covered, nobody told me that. AINews: So the club owner lied to you?
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Movies Featuring
