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Music

How Kirstie Alley's Strange Tweets About Skrillex Sparked My Descent Into Madness

I think she’s saying she wants to...wait no...maybe not actually.
Skrillex photo by Jason Nocito, Kirstie Alley photo via Wikimedia Commons, Deranged Illustration author's own.

Do you, like me, spend too much time lingering in the Twitter timelines of quasi-celebs whose most famous cultural contributions in your lifetime are advertisements? Well, hey, if you do, you may have noticed that apparent Donald Trump supporter Kirstie Alley (best known as Cheers' Rebecca Howe, the longtime spokesperson for the Jenny Craig weight loss program, and the titular character in the short-lived TV Land sitcom Kirstie), has once again picked up one of her favorite Twitter topics: her love for Skrillex.

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To uncover the full story, we must go back nearly half a decade, to 2011—Skrillex's early heyday as a solo artist, and shortly after Alley's runner-up finish in Season 12 of Dancing With the Stars. On December 21, presumably while gearing up for whatever holiday very serious Scientologists celebrate in the winter, Alley unleashed the first in a series of curious tweets—embedded up above for your convenience. She writes, simply: "Skrillex…;)"

Skrillex…;)

— Kirstie Alley (@kirstiealley)December 21, 2011

It's a baffling string of characters, one that would have been total gibberish just a few decades ago—when Skrillex was just a young boy and emoticons weren't really a thing. But even in the present-day context of knowing who Skrillex is, it's hard not to feel vaguely unsettled by the whole situation. Was she just another non-Millennial using Twitter in the early days of the platform, ignorant as to what havoc she was unleashing with such vagueness? Did she and Sonny share some sort of inside joke that an emoticon would recall without any other context? Was it a Scientology thing? Skrillex was raised around Scientology after all.Wait…is she saying…that she wants to…you know? The mind reels with possibilities.

There's a very good chance that this tweet—as well as all its attendant questions—is the reason I first followed followed Alley, though I can't remember exactly. Maybe I hoped that an explanation would surface. But there hasn't been much more context since. Based on her tweeting history, it seems that there was, in 2012, a potential trip to see David Guetta and Skrillex at Ultra that was thwarted because Alley was to be in Italy at the time. Was she even a fan of the man if she wasn't willing to make the pilgrimage to see him at dance music's brightest stage? The same day, she tweeted at the man himself: "@Skrillex Jeez.. I HAVE to dance with you….just HAVE to….XXO."

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— Kirstie Alley (@kirstiealley)February 29, 2012

— Kirstie Alley (@kirstiealley)February 29, 2012

More questions, more ellipses. Alleys' Tweets certainly remind me of an everyday fan's thirsty at-replies to Sonny, but there's something more going on here. In February of 2012, Alley would've still just been a few months removed from her heroic Dancing With the Stars run, which proved that she had the dancefloor prowess to match Moore's thunderous beats. But why, exactly, did she even think that Skrillex has much interest in dancing? Maybe she knew something he didn't—that, like Alley says, she literally had to dance with Skrillex in order to prevent some sort of timeline ripping tragedy, Back to the Future style. But Alley offered no more answers, and no further Tweets about Skrillex for years to come.

This morning, while laying in bed, eyes still bleary from sleep, I came across the latest installment in the saga. I'd unfollowed Alley out of frustration years before, but here it was finally, an explanation. Utilizing Twitter's quote-tweet function—a feature that didn't even exist when she began this strange internet dalliance—she embedded the original winky-faced tweet and added a bit of annotation: "Ahhhhh always Skrillex…:)". A satisfied yawn, a smirk, and a whole world of possibility in three plain black dots. God. Damn. It.

Ahhhhh always Skrillex…:) — Kirstie Alley (@kirstiealley)July 23, 2016

To my knowledge, Skrillex has never responded to Alley's tweets.

I reached out to Alley on Twitter to see if she could shed any light onto this situation, but she has yet to respond at press time. This may be a mystery that isn't meant to be solved.

— Colin Joyce (@outtasiteoutta)July 26, 2016

Colin Joyce is THUMP's Managing Editor and he too likes to thirst tweet at famous DJs.