Yet Again Lorenzo

If you could write letters to anyone, and receive letters from anyone, who would it be? I've been thinking this over because I've discovered a new favorite person in the world--a Swedish cut-upwho writes to Marc Jacobs about her fashion missteps, Fletch, the uncanny similarity between King Tut and Donna Karan, vintage aprons, and Irene Dunne's wardrobe. I think at the moment I would most like to get letters from Emi herself, but never mind that. . . .for whom would you stay up late at night pushing the Send and Receive button over and over again, hoping against hope for that magical bobbing icon to appear?

When I was a younger person, a boyfriend signed me up for the Lorenzo Lamas fan club--I continued to receive life-size posters of this person for years. . . . they followed me, thanks to the ever-vigilant people at Canada Post, to Toronto, to Germany, to France, to California. I would rush to the door, flushed with joy that my mom or my sister or friend who anticipated the lonely life of an exile had sent me something, treat the delivery person to an ecstatic smile and rip open my parcel from home only to realize that it was yet again Lorenzo.

So I guess I would like to write to Lorenzo Lamas at some point and find out from him whether he ever woke in the middle of a sunbath to find himself thinking about grey rain on the Baltic and unable to explain why. But that would be a one-time thing. I don't imagine I would get a lot out of a long-term correspondence with him, despite the fact that his mother was Arlene Dahl. Reading his biography does make me want to know more about, for example, his tragically brief first marriage (were they just too young? did she not like the unicorn tattoo?), or whether he minds that everyone now knows that he wears hair extensions for professional roles, but these are the sorts of things you'd want to ask anyone.

But to whom to pour the soul out? If Richard Brautigan were still alive, I could imagine sending mournful little missives to Montana and receiving in reply a shiny penny, a page torn from the Salt Lake city yellow pages, or some little specks in the bottom of an otherwise empty envelope. I would like to hear something from the person who made the 17th-century rug that sits on our living room floor after a strange journey through Prague and my husband's ancestral homes in outlying Moravian villages--how did you train your fingers to work such tiny knots? As I write this, it dawns on me that perhaps I don't want to hear anything on the subject--the maker was probably an indentured child, and now everytime Smoochie lurches across the room on his pampered little tootsies I will be wracked with guilt.

Apart from quirky books and ancient rugs, what is it that I want, and who makes it? And what does it say about me that all I can think of is ginger chocolate?

Are you out there?
Vin