FIRE ISLAND, N.Y. – Outside the range of her long-running cable access TV show, most people had likely never heard of Robin Byrd until recently, despite her performance in one of the best known adult movies (with one of the most often-referenced titles) ever made: Debbie Does Dallas.
There are many reasons why retired porn performers suddenly show up again in the news from time to time, ranging from finding Jesus and becoming anti-porn activists to losing their teaching jobs when one of their students spills the beans about seeing them on a tube site.
Byrd’s return to the headlines took a slightly different vector, however — one I actually hadn’t run across before: A raccoon.
As the story goes, Byrd was out on her porch one day when she heard some nearby growling, which she thought was a cat. In what probably wasn’t a wise move, she blindly reached her hand behind a planter from which the sound seemed to be emanating, only to discover the hard way the sound was being made by a feral raccoon.
To Byrd’s credit, she chose not to play the victim card with respect to her injuries, instead displaying a great deal of sensitivity toward the raccoon’s perspective.
“I’m in Central Park all the time. There are raccoons,” Byrd said. “I don’t go and touch them or anything. I guess I disturbed the raccoon and he didn’t like it, and he let me know.”
What really makes this story, though, isn’t its facts, its setting, or its formerly porn-performing protagonist. What makes the story honest-to-god newsworthy is the headline that accompanied the follow-up coverage: “Former porn actress re-releases song after raccoon attack.”
The job of a headline is to draw in the reader; to get them to think to themselves, “Now there’s something about which I want to read more,” or at the very least, “WTF? This can’t be right.”
I ask you, who would not want to find out what’s behind a headline like “Former porn actress rereleases song after raccoon attack?”
From a clickbait perspective, the headline has simply everything you need for a major pop-culture headline hit: music, porn, violence and a raccoon!
The decision to re-release “Touch Me” following the raccoon encounter shows Byrd never lost her porn-industry instincts to capitalize on an opportunity for publicity. And, just like people still in the porn industry, whether the idea or device for generating publicity is good is less important than the mere fact the opportunity exists.
Honestly, I think it would have been kind of a shame if the song were any good, because this might mean the public unfairly ignored it following the original release, which would introduce something too-somber into the mix of this otherwise good-times story.
Fortunately, the song is every bit as awful as you expect it to be. It’s almost like someone took 1970s disco, modern EDM and the sounds from the old-school video game “Defender,” put them into an industrial six-blade blender, then threw in a few blurts from a poorly-tuned piano for good measure.
Still, terrible though the song may be, I hope it goes straight to the top of the charts in its second go-round — if for no other reason than as a reward for making possible what just might be The Best Porn Headline Ever.
