She was a little bit chubby and a whole lot dweeby, a freckled, bespectacled little girl who didn't seem to care what other people thought. She was, let's not forget, dressed in a bee suit.
It took her exactly 4 minutes and 7 seconds to become one of the defining images of mid-1990s pop culture. That's how long she was on screen, dancing her giddy, silly bee dance, in a music video for a lesser-known rock group called Blind Melon.
The Bee Girl, as she came to be known by just about everyone, rubbed elbows with Madonna and brought down the house at the MTV Video Music Awards. She traded jokes with Jay Leno, filmed interviews with Inside Edition, and quickly became far more popular than Blind Melon itself.
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.
•••
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.
That's how the video to Blind Melon's sleepy hit, "No Rain," begins. The rest of the video follows the Bee Girl as she skips across the grimy streets of Los Angeles, doing her dance for the perplexed strangers she meets along the way.
It ends with her pushing open a gate and discovering a green field crowded with happy, dancing bee people just like her.
Heather DeLoach was 9 years old when she landed the gig, mostly because she looked like the drummer's nerdy sister. She didn't know much about dancing, so she just shimmied from side to side and let her arms go wild.
They filmed the video in 1992. Parts of Los Angeles were still smoldering from riots when Heather tap-danced her way through the city as the Bee Girl. Those perplexed strangers in the video? They were just normal people – a homeless man, some customers at a market – that the film crew talked into appearing in the video.
Heather went home exhausted after two days of filming, her underarms rubbed raw from the sequins on her too-tight bee costume. Her mother, Susan, thinks she made a few thousand dollars in her role as the Bee Girl. Soon enough, she was back at school in Lake Forest, just another 9-year-old kid.
And then the video hit MTV.
•••
"I think Jay's going to ask me how I got in the video and if I have any boyfriends and what I want to do with my life." That was Heather in 1993, shortly after the video came out – and just before her appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."
The life of the Bee Girl went from zero to crazy in the time it took that video to air. Suddenly, newspapers and television shows were calling for interviews. MTV made her one of the closing acts of its 1993 video-awards show; she remembers sharing a dressing room with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
She landed big-screen roles after that – in "A Little Princess" in 1995 and "The Beautician and the Beast" two years later. More recently, she made cameo appearances in "Balls of Fury" (2007) and in the television cops-spoof "Reno 911!"
But as she got older, she decided she didn't want to miss out on growing up. She began canceling auditions and interviews so she could spend time with her friends. She graduated from El Toro High School in Lake Forest, then got a degree in Communications from Cal State Fullerton.
Her current boyfriend didn't even know that she was, in fact, the Bee Girl until they had been dating for a few weeks.
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.
•••
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."
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