Anaheim Hills, California
July 10, 2000

Dear Readers,

The time was yesterday. The place was the Mark Taper Auditorium, in the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. The thing was Sarah Vowell reading her warm and stirring Fourth of July letterto a sizable and appreciative crowd. She also read a funny essay about going to Disney World from her recent book, andher Tom Landry obituary from McSweeney’s, but those are works from which people have read aloud before. Not so with Open Letters. Not in public, anyway. Sarah Vowell: she is a trailblazer.

If dreams counted as reality though, Sarah would be second, and I would be first. The fact is that last Tuesday morning, I awoke, anxiously, from a dream in which I had been standing in front of a lectern in a mega-bookstore, a Barnes and Noble or a Chapters.

There were, in the dream, about fifty people sitting in front of me, including several little kids. I was holding in my hands a stapled print-out of the Open Letters weekly, and I was apparently supposed to read something aloud. But, as happens so often in dreams, when I looked down at the page, I felt as though I was having a stroke. My eyes blurred, the words were in Italian, nothing parsed. I pressed on, because I had said I would, and read a few sentences, or whatever they were. But it was no use. And so, in the dream, I tossed the stapled magazine away in a flutter of paper, clapped my hands together, and said, cheerily, “So. Anyone here having a birthday today?”

A few of the young children, unsmiling, raised their hand.

“Okay!” I said. “Is anyone turning four?”

Today’s letter, by Chana Shvonne Williford, is the long-awaited sequel tothe first-ever Open Letters letter. If you haven’t read either letter yet, you might want to start with the first one. If you have read the first one, then you’ll be intrigued to see how things turned out with Tattoo Guy.

I won’t go on about Chana. I did that the last time. My admiration for her is unstinting, though, and I’m glad things are looking up down in Dallas. She promises a third letter to Sarah is forthcoming, and that once again, she’ll cc Open Letters.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough