New York City
November 29, 2000

Dear Readers,

Man Week continues today with Michael Welch’s letter on sex, lies, and doing bong hits with your literary heroes.

This is Michael’s third open letter. Hisfirst was about his worst birthday ever, driving around with an ex-girlfriend on a bad Ecstasy trip. [Michael wrote me the other day to say that he'd recently looked back at the Ecstasy letter, and "it depressed me because that's the best thing I've ever written. Hands down in my mind. It actually made me tear up (but I'm drunk but still)."] His second letterwas a cornerstone of our coverage of the American election: a breaking-news, you-are-there account of staying up all night at Al Gore’s final campaign rally, trying to get a girl into bed. That latter theme continues in today’s letter, but without the Al Gore part.

(Speaking of love and letters, a brief digression: last week we received this account of the reading habits of Open Letters subscriber Andy LaRue:

I read Open Letters every Monday on my train home from work (in Philadelphia). I eagerly wait for The Day when the girl of my dreams shall lean over from the seat behind me and say, “Is that Open Letters? What are you doing tonight?”

And I’ll say, “Not much.”

Please be advised that such romantic encounters are far more likely to occur with the PDF version of Open Letters than with the web version: yet another reason to subscribe to the Open Letters weekly. Every Sunday, we’ll email you a file that contains all the week’s letters in a nicely laid-out, easy-to-print format. You’ll print it out, take it on the train [or to the donut shop] and wait for The Day. It will come.)

Back to Michael Welch. In addition to his increasingly frequent contributions to Open Letters, he is the proprietor of a grand experiment in personal online journalism called Commonplace, where he chronicles, in serial form, his life as a pizza-restaurant waiter and newspaper reporter in Tampa, Florida. It is always worth reading.

Yesterday marked our first step into multilingualism: we published Bruce Grierson’s letter, about the war with the beavers, in both English and French. We received a flurry of response, from both sides of the Canada-U.S. border: Colin Whyte, a snowboarder in Whistler, B.C., wrote,

I’m super down with your bilingual letter in today’s OL. It could just be the concussion I received yesterday morning on the mountain, but the decision to include the same letter in both languages seems kind of genius to me – and so un-American. C’est vraiment cool – même si je déteste les castors….

Yvette Walker, of Kansas City, wrote,

Les Open Letters en français? Formidable! Je ne suis pas un francophone, mais j’aime la langue et les Québecois. J’ai passé beaucoup des étés a Montréal, la ville de Quebec and St. Foy, et le province est tellement belle. Parce que beaucoup d’écriveurs des Open Letters viennent de Canada, j’espere qu’il sera plus de letters en français.

Yvette writes that she hopes that we’ll run more French letters, and perhaps we will, some day. Today’s letter, though, is English-only, and all-American. It is so rich and densely textured a meal that our current plan is to leave it in place until Friday morning, when we post the conclusion to Man Week. But one never knows, does one?

Yours truly,

Paul Tough