PHILADELPHIA — Liza Minnelli has outlived 507 major news events — at least according to superfan and former employee Scott Gorenstein.

His Twitter account @LiZaOutlives has chronicled Minnelli’s lifespan through news headlines since 2020. Minnelli has outlived not just Mikhail Gorbachev and Stephen Sondheim, but Herschel Walker’s political career, a world without Bennifer, Internet Explorer, and Tom Brady’s brief retirement.

Known for Gorenstein’s black humor and to-the-point prose, LizaOutlives boasts over 115,000 followers who use the account like a funny news source. But for Gorenstein, it’s another way to do what he believes he’s done since his childhood, growing up in Northeast Philly: “Put Liza first.”

The account is a shrine to the complexity of internet stan culture, where fans perform dedication through tweets, fancams and viral pleas to celebrities who seldom acknowledge them. Gorenstein loves Liza. It doesn’t matter if she loves him back.

And according to The New Yorker, she doesn’t. Making things even stickier, Gorenstein was once on his idol’s payroll, unlike most other internet fans posting into oblivion.

Still, it’s these stan accounts that set the agenda of the internet, its language, and who is allowed to speak it. Some have become celebrities in their own right — like Harry Styles fan Brittany Broski and Ashley Leechen, who reshaped her existence to mimic Taylor Swift — garnering more attention than their idols on obscure corners of the web.

But before there was Twitter, there was Gorenstein’s obsession with the singer-actress-dancer-original-nepo-baby, which was born while he was a student at Farrell Elementary in Rhawnhurst.

“I was born like this,” Gorenstein, now in his 50s, told The Inquirer. “I was into [Minnelli’s] celebrity more than anything. I couldn’t believe how sparkly she was.”

He started LizaOutlives as a riff on a meme format from a Twitter account that tracked actor Rip Torn’s lifespan in news events. Gorenstein even told the creator before sending his first tweet in February 2020: Liza had outlived the marriage of Pamela Anderson and Jon Peters.

Gorenstein said he intended for the account to “be an exercise in writing and a chance to throw my lady’s name out there,” not a news source, joke-factory hybrid.

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