Los Angeles, California
July 6, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Blue Chevigny. I was first introduced to Blue in 1994, at the Life Café on East Tenth Street in Manhattan. Blue, who was then twenty-three and working at an AIDS hospice, told me she’d just finished photocopying her first zine, an extended essay, with photos, on the way Mary Tyler Moore had served as a recurring inspiration in her life. I gave her my address and asked her to send it to me, and we began an unusual correspondence.

It was unusual in two ways. The first was that we lived about a mile apart, and yet we communicated for years only through the U.S. Postal Service. The second was that most of Blue’s missives to me were in the form of these beautiful little self-published zines that she sent out to a few dozen correspondents every six months or so. One recounted a series of dreams she’d been having; another was about the way that she and her friends had become obsessed with My So-Called Life; a third was about the Beatles; but they all functioned, to my mind, as the best sort of personal correspondence: They weren’t directed to me, specifically, but they were intimate and revealing and engrossing in the way that only a letter (or a zine, I guess) can be.

Blue lives in Chicago now, and I’m in Los Angeles, and the world-wide web has caught up with both of us, but I was happy to find out, when I read her letter about faith and movies, that she still writes the same way.

Blue does radio now, too, by the way. She just did a great story for This American Life about a job she had helping homeless people find apartments in New York. You can listen to it, if you have Real Audio, by going here. Her story comes about 45 minutes into the hour.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough