The "bee girl" in Blind Melon's "No Rain" video is 26 now

Heel n Toe · 04-13-2009, 08:54 AM

This article was picked up by our local paper this weekend... interesting stuff:

Excerpted...

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But that was a long time ago. These days, the Bee Girl goes by her real name, Heather DeLoach. She's 26 years old, a bartender and aspiring actress with dog named Hemi and a condo in Laguna Niguel. And, in recent years, she's come to understand something very important about her alter ego.

The world needed a Bee Girl.

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The Bee Girl wore dark-rimmed glasses, crooked antennae and a black-and-yellow tutu that didn't quite fit right. She tap-danced, she waved her arms, she spun around - and, in her first moments of fame, she got laughed offstage.

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It ends with her pushing open a gate and discovering a green field crowded with happy, dancing bee people just like her.

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She still has those thick glasses in a keepsake chest in her bedroom, along with those crooked bee antennae. The Bee Girl, she says, "is a part of me now. I am her... I love it."

She wrote on her MySpace page: "Some people call me 'Bummble Bee' (and) if you know me then you know why." And that's how she began to realize just what the Bee Girl had meant to so many people.

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The letters come from short people and fat people, people who have been laughed at and hurt _ people who didn't fit in. They have seen Heather's name in a news story, and found her on MySpace... was she really the Bee Girl?

One man wrote about how badly he was teased growing up _ and how he took comfort in the idea that even a little girl dressed like a bee could find a place to belong. It was the same for a woman who wrote about how other kids always made fun of her for being short; she, too, found inspiration in the Bee Girl.

Heather gets a few letters like those every week. "Have you ever felt like your heart is smiling?" she said. "It makes me feel like a good person." She does her best to answer them all.

The Bee Girl, she says now, "was somebody that had an inner spark. She seemed very introverted on the outside, but on the inside, she had kind of this inner light, to go out and be alive.

"I think she was full of hope. She had the feeling that she could go out and find acceptance, that there are people out there like her."

"It's a story that gets people through," she says. "When I go through tough times, the Bee Girl prevails."

http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/128538087