Have you ever sent an electronic message to a well-known person and received a personal reply? And you were confident it was actually them? For me…
Around 20 years ago I emailed singer Essra Mohawk, and we continued to communicate back-and-forth for a number of weeks.
Actress Tantoo Cardinal has replied to messages I have sent her on Messenger.
Moe Tucker (drummer for The Velvet Underground) occasionally replies to questions I have asked on her Facebook page. I also helped her find a restaurant in the town she lives in.
Steve Shelley (Drummer for Sonic Youth) replied to a message I sent him on Messenger.
20 years ago I sent an email to Allan Fryer (singer for Australian band Heaven). He replied and sent some photos of his band. They were scanned Polaroids.
Around 22 years ago Arturo Vega (artist for The Ramones) sent a nice reply to an email I sent him.
Many well-known science fiction writers, that was email and was generally business related. Alan Dean Foster once emailed me out if the blue and I’ve corresponded with Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, various SF editors, and many others.
Sometime around 2002 - 2005, I sent an email to Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, the programmer of the chess engine Shredder which was the leading chess engine at the time, asking him what language Shredder was programmed in.
In retrospect, I was naïve and the answer should have been not at all hard to guess, given my future education in computer science, but Stefan was kind enough to reply to my email and say that Shredder is programmed in ANSI C. I’ve since lost that email though, because it was on my old Yahoo Mail account which doesn’t accept the password that I thought I originally set for it.
When I was an undergraduate (not going to say which year because it might end up doxxing me), I took an Intro to Astronomy course taught by Adam Riess, who later went on to win the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. However, my only email to him was highly mundane, asking for the date of the final exam since it wasn’t on the syllabus.
In 2014 I sent a Facebook message to the Danish badminton player Hans-Kristian Vittinghus, asking him where I can buy a jersey with his name on the back, and he told me that there was no official store that sells them, but he gave them out every now and then through competitions on his Facebook page.
I’ve been a fan of singer-songwriter Toby Lightman since she released her first album. Last year, on her “public” Facebook page, she asked if there were fans who would like to participate in one of her music videos, particularly people who had had to deal with infertility issues (since that was the inspiration for the song which she had created). I volunteered, and she and I corresponded via email for several weeks to get the video clips sorted out and uploaded.
There’s an English author and columnist, Mil Millington, who gained some fame for a proto-blog website he created, years ago, entitled, “Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.” He later wrote a fictionalized novel, based on the web site; after reading the novel, I wrote an email to him, asking about one of the lines in the book that was in German (his girlfriend, IRL and in the novel, is German), and he replied – he was very amused by the slightly skewed interpretation I had of one of the words (mistaking “broom” for “prostitute”, or something like that, IIRC).
Years ago I was in a night school magazine publishing program, and in my writing class, I did my final article project a profile on an actress friend of mine I’d met while working on a movie set. She’s worked a few times with Bruce Campbell, so I wrote to his official web page with a couple of questions (part of the assignment, reach out to three associates of the subject for background). He wrote me back within a couple of hours, and couldn’t have been nicer.
Alan Spencer, who created the TV show Sledge Hammer!, manned his own MySpace page (yeah, I’m from that era) and would answer messages there. That was pretty fun.
Funny the OP mentioned Moe Tucker. She and I have a couple of FB mutuals, and she once liked a comment I’d made in a thread on my friend’s post. It’s totally silly, I know, but all that went through my head was “for ten seconds, the drummer for the Velvet Underground knew I existed” which, considering what a touchstone the Velvets were for me in high school, was no minor thing.
Many years ago on another message board I frequented back then, I posted something funny (I think, I don’t recall details). Anyway, I got a message from Wil Wheaton commenting on what I’d posted (he was known to frequent the board).
I replied, he replied to my reply. We went back and forth a bit then our convo petered out. I remember thinking he seemed like a cool dude.
Mike Mills, former bass player for R.E.M., has a robust Twitter presence (which has gone a long way toward helping me forget that the band has been gone for a decade). He has responded to me a couple of times. One day I may be brave enough to tell him I disagree with him on the designated hitter. But probably not.
The novel Anno Dracula contains a number of references to other obscure works of vampire fiction. I recognized many of them but there were some I couldn’t figure out. I posted a question about these on a vampire fiction message board and received a response that identified all of the references. I was thinking this person was really well informed and then I realized it was Kim Newman, the author of the book.
I thought about posting a set of annotations online for the series. But Jess Nevins did it (and did a much better job of it) before I completed mine.
There was a thread here trying to identify an actress in a music video from the '80s. Google didn’t turn up an answer, so a few people were posting their best guesses. I thought it could be Rebecca Staab; not a household name, but has been acting pretty steadily since the '80s, including an episode of Seinfeld. On a lark, I found her Facebbok page and sent a message asking if it was her. I figured I’d be lucky to ever hear back, but she replied within a couple minutes and we chatted for a bit. She said the time and place would have been right, but it wasn’t her in the video. Then she started googling to figure out who it was.
She seemed totally cool. I always hoped we’d find the answer so I could send her another message.
On rec.comic.strips years ago I made a comment on Foxtrot (topic iirc was when a comic strip should finally be retired, and why). Bill Amend the creator & artist of Foxtrot wrote me a short email explaining how he was feeling a bit burned out and agreed with the discussion that it’s better to quit early than to hang on too long. He indeed quit doing the daily strips a few years later.
Only three I can think of:
In 1965, 14-year old San Diego kid me wrote a fan letter to George Harrison’s mother Louise. I got a personal hand-written reply. Still have it. Learned a few years later that she was famous for her interactions with Beatles fans.
About 20 years ago I emailed Van Dyke Parks with a question about a project I thought he might have been involved with. Received a gracious response.
About the same time I exchanged a couple of em’s with Bob Brozman, regarding his albums with Debashish Bhattacharya.
While he was writing his breakthrough book, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain was a regular participant in an AOL chat room and message board called “The Book Shelf” Somewhere on a hard drive from a defunct computer I have a conversation via IM we had once about cooking knives. He sent me Global paring knife after that conversation.
Dr. Demento aka Barret Hansen. Somewhere I have his email and cell phone. Or at least as it was about 10 years or so ago. ETA, also his home address. We were coordinating a donation he was making to the WeirdalStarFund that eventually resulted in Weird Al getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.