Once upon a time, I worked at a very
small, twice-a-week
newspaper in a
little town in the
Texas Panhandle. We would occasionally receive a
Letter to the Editor, and it would nearly always
brighten our day, because we had a regular
stable of
folks with a
weak grasp on
reality, a weaker
grasp of
spelling and
grammar, and access to
reams and reams of
paper. Reading
impassioned rants from people who
believed that the most pressing
issue of the day was the
failure of the
government to
imprison schoolteachers for teaching kids about
dinosaurs made all your
problems look relatively
insignificant. But one person made all the other
cranks look like
paragons of
intelligence and
sanity.
She referred to herself as "
Cinderella" because that was a
childhood nickname. She'd
punctuate her letters with
odd, out-of-place
asides like "The
children are our
future, truly!" and "My
boyfriend says I am
beautiful like a
princess, truly!" and "For I am
woman, truly!" She really loved the word "
truly." She wrote one letter ranting about how
awful the
police were, then wrote another one
ranting about how much she liked the
police. She wrote one letter
ranting about how
horrible the local
schools were, then wrote another telling
kids they should
stay in school. She wrote one letter ranting about the
evils of
drugs, then wrote
another that included a full
recipe for
magic brownies (No, that one never got
printed -- the
publisher was afraid he'd get
arrested).
When we started printing her
letters, Cinderella started
visiting the offices, wanting to
talk to the
editor about getting her a
regular column. The editor talked to her once and said
no, thanks, but that didn't stop Cinderella. The editor quickly learned to
recognize Cinderella's
voice -- when she heard her come in the
door, she'd
hide under the desk so it would look like she wasn't
in. The rest of us would
pass her back and forth and
laugh into our hands at the
funny expressions people made when she started to
riff on her "
beautiful princess" bit. Eventually, she either got
tired of us, moved away, or got back on her
medication...