So I was perusing one of my favorite sites this morning- -The Smoking Gun- -when I ran across this little nugget.
It’s apparently fan mail sent to Mariah Carey back in 2000 that had been unceremoniously dumped on a Manhattan street corner awaiting the sanitation truck. Some of it, luckily for us, was intercepted by fans of the site above and posted for all to read.
Some of it is odd, some of it is bizarre, and some of it is, quite frankly, damn funny.
It’s hard for me to explain why, but for some reason looking at those pictures and reading those letters makes me sad. Some of the people come across as sad and lonely. I imagine celebrities get a lot of that. Some people really turn to people in the public eye with the most heartbreaking problems. I remember listening to a “This American Life” piece about a guy named Willie Nelson. He was not “the” Willie Nelson but he received a lot of voice mail directed towards the country singer. Some of it was quite sad – people asking Willie to come see their dying mother, wife, child, etc. I would imagine that being a celebrity really makes you a lonely person / weirdo magnet.
I’d have to have somebody screen my calls and mail. And that makes me sad, too, to think about all of those lonely, desperate people making a plea for help, attention, whatever and getting screened by some assistant.