📰 ARTICLE | Frolic Mills: Beyond the Legend
by Ponchituti Boucher
Photography: Daniel Salvatore Salvetti
Video: Shantal Gravois
It isn’t easy for me to write about Frolic Mills. He was such a complex being that deciding which of his countless facets to touch on becomes complicated.
To say that Frolic is the creator, founder, mastermind, genius and father of everything that exists, and will ever exist, in modeling in SL is unfair, because it falls short and doesn’t do justice to what he did. When we talk about Frolic, his legacy and his reach within SL, we’d have to talk about models, yes, but also designers, builders, architects, choreographers, DJs, photographers, videographers, and an endless list of sectors of the Second Life fashion world that owe him their visibility, their chance to show their talent and their later success, and everything he did for them, directly or indirectly. In fact, if you are reading this, if I am writing this, two years after his passing, it’s thanks to everything he did in SL. Frolic was, and always will be, the legend.
But everything he achieved in the fashion world, which he was proud of and committed to, is largely documented in thousands of articles, videos and testimonials.
Today, on his real life birthday, I’d like to share something different: the person behind the avatar.
Frolic studied finance at a university in the United States, which would explain his good nose for business. He had a true passion for beauty, a keen eye for detail, and a natural radar for spotting talent wherever it was, which explains his eagle eye for knowing where to place his interest and invest his energy. He had an inner child who refused to leave him, even in his hardest moments, and who gave him a freshness and an absurdly baffling sense of humor. One example was the day he sent me a photo of the second tumor they had found when the illness struck for the second time. He said: “Look, manita, isn’t it beautiful? It’s so pinkish, so pretty.” And I, who didn’t know what to say to such devastating news delivered in such a crazy way, said: “Manito, how can you call that shit pretty?” And he said: “Oh, manita, because it is! You have no idea how ugly the last one was, it was poop brown, horrible!”
He was my brother in life and, like any brother, there were times we fought and I wanted to strangle him, literally, but the anger only lasted ten minutes, because he always came out with some idiocy or stroke of genius that made me laugh, and it was all over. We kept a family relationship: to my kids he was Uncle Frolic, and to my mother he was a kind of nephew who came out of this thing called Second Life that she has never understood. To us, Frolic wasn’t an avatar; he was a member of our family who sat at our table, slept in our home, and made us laugh far too many times, like during his recovery from his appendicitis surgery, which he spent at our house. My goodness, how spoiled and difficult he was the first few days, hahahaha. He’d say: “Manita, do something, it hurts!” And I was dying of laughter.
He was a true sybarite without trying to be one, because it came naturally to him. But above all, he was the one who was there for me in my darkest moments. I could never repay him for everything he did for me.
I could write about him for hours; the moments and stories from so many years would be endless, But at this moment, only two verses of a song keep repeating endlessly in my mind:
Where are you, my heart?
I cannot hear you beat.
The pain is so great
That I cannot cry.
I wish I could cry,
But I have no tears left.
I loved him so much, and he left.
Never to return.
Happy birthday, wherever you are, manito.
Don’t worry, I’ll keep your legacy alive.
Just like I promised you.
I love you infinitely!
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