Someone just asked me if I like fan mail and my immediate thought was “Yes! I love getting fan mail,” but you have to understand… See, the VAST majority of the fan mail I’ve received has been from the Kindergarten-6th grade crowd in the form of a homework assignment after a puppet show. There are drawings! And spelling errors which make everything worthwhile. One of the joys came from reading them phonetically aloud.
Here is a transcript of my favorite. It came with a quite good drawing of the Pied Piper.
Dear Rears of Joy,
I licked your pupies. Hope you came agin. I licked Rumplestilstkin too. If you come back I’ll lick them all again.
Your fred
[name redacted]
How, I ask you, how could anything possible top the beauty of that?
That’s awesome. We could all use more letters like that. Makes the heart light.
And drawings! Don’t forget the drawings!
Rears of Joy?
I toyed with the idea of sending you a fan letter in the style of an elementary school letter, but if I made it anything like that one I’m sure I’d get slapped with a restraining order . . .
We actually got that particular one more than once.
Pure poetry, straight from the heart. Doesn’t get any better, does it?
Something tells me you’re going to enjoy warm fuzzies from that piece of fan mail for a loooonngg time.
This is great! As a father of two, I have seen “Your fred” often. I laughed out loud at this. Thanks for sharing.
That’s wonderful! One of the best fan-mails I ever got came from a middle-schooler in a small, Montana town where I’d given a presentation on writing. The boy was a poet in a place where no one understands poetry, but he said he was inspired by seeing a grown man who wrote poetry. And he drew me a bunny. I still have that bunny on my fridge.
Frum now won I promze to rite all my fan male wth mispeld wurds.