TheDiva

Meet the Cappers

• Handle: TheDiva
• Real Name: Christi E.
• D.O.B.: March 12, 1977
• Occupation: Children's librarian, semi-professional singer/actress, general nuisance
• Marital Status: Happily married.
• Kids: Eric, born September 2009. Also Kali and Sita, who despite having four legs, fur, and a habit of cleaning themselves with their tongue are very much part of the family.
• Handle Origin: Depending on your definition, diva means a) goddess, b) female singer with attitude, c) capper with a musical background and delusions of grandeur, or d) all of the above.
• Alternate Handle(s): TheMaskedDiva, TheCarolingDiva
• You Can Find Me Capping: I'll tell you later

Personal info

Early Life

On March 10, 1977, a massive snowstorm ripped through Denver, Colorado, making the roads all but impassible. Fortunately for her parents, Christi had enough sense not to be born during such an inconvenient time, making her first grand entrance two days later. A socially awkward child, Christi survived her early years by avoiding reality as much as humanly possible. Despite this, she had a deep love for the theatrical, and eventually received a bachelor's degree in music theater. Unfortunately, the lure of the limelight was no match for the lure of a steady income (that did not involve waiting tables or doing data entry), and so Christi turned to the high-profile world of library and information services for her graduate degree.

Capping History

In the late 1990s, the magazine Entertainment Weekly published the only truly meaningful article in the journal's history: a review of the MST3K section on Sci-Fi.com's website. Mentioned in passing was Caption This, a place where users could make their own snarky commentary to Sci-Fi's programming. While the critic did not seem to think the site to have much merit, the idea of playing Joel Robinson with other people intrigued Christi, and shortly after reading the review checked out the site for herself. Selecting "TheDiva" as her online handle (a sobriquet derived from her then e-mail address and her general love of music), she took her first tenantive steps into capping, making riffs on "Star Trek," "The Stand," "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" and other shows. To her amazement and delight, the newly-minted Diva discovered that a) the other cappers were very funny, and b) they seemed to think she was funny, laughing at and even saving her captions. But the legendary problems with broken screengrabs were a toll on the young capper, and she soon left Caption This for the more fertile grounds of Inventing Situations and Glitter's Cap-Page Board. Today she caps almost exclusively on the latter, although she has been known to pop up on other venues from time to time.

Capping Style

Diva is an extremely prolific capper, apparently favoring quantity over quality. Her riffs tackle a wide range of subjects from work concerns, genre television and film, musicals, SCA/Rennaisance Festivals, current affairs, and whatever's passing through her head at the moment. Although she has admitted to numerous Capper Crushes (among them Hugh Jackman, Alan Rickman, and Colin Firth), more and more of her comments have referenced a mysterious figure known only as "Steve" (not to be confused with Steve the Astronaut). She is a self-described "trivia geek" and has been known to go off on random tangents of useless information (more and more of these have been related to her son as of late). Despite all this, the other Cappers continue to tolerate her presence.

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