San Francisco, California
December 14, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s artifact, part of the week of collaboration between Other People’s Mail and Open Letters, was sent to us by the man who received it, John Hodgman, the author of two open letters about summer on the Jersey shore. (In September John wrote about his bad memory; in October, about being shot into space.) 

Lady Stardust’s entreaty, like the many scam letters I’ve collected for Other People’s Mail, inhabits the opposite end of the spectrum from the intensely personal letters (like Danny and Brandi) I’ve published. It’s everybody’s very own mail. We asked John to tell the story of how Lady Stardust found him, and why he was tempted to believe she had something to offer. Here’s what he said:

In early 1993, I opened a letter saying that I was a winner. I know you won’t believe me on this. Surely there was fine print I had missed, some gymnastic conditional phrasing I might have noted (“If ‘John Hodgman’ is the name we select in two months after receiving the correctly formatted entry form, then it is possible that the next letter you receive from us will read JOHN KELLOGG HODGMAN IS THE WINNER!”). But the fact is, I read the letter very carefully. It was very plain and very clear and entirely a lie. I had won money, it said, no bones about it, and I would only need to call to claim my prize.

The credit-card debt was already mounting in those days, and I was younger and still believed in fortune’s smile. So even though it was a 900 number ($1.99 per minute), I still called. A recorded message asked me to be patient, and after listening to the endless canned hold music for a while, I came to my senses and hung up. But it was too late. As I would soon learn, the “call our 900 number to claim your prize” routine is one of the most common tricks of the scam sweepstakes trade. And even though I didn’t stay on the line that long, simply calling the number was an announcement to the shadowy fleece-by-mail underground: here, at 16 Edgewood Avenue, lived a rube.

Whatever you may have heard about the manipulative senior-baiting of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse and Reader’s Digest sweepstakes programs, these organizations are angelic compared to the blatant thievery of the smaller cons who, with a mailing list and a stamp machine, thrived in the pre-internet bust-times of the early 90s. At least my aunt Yolanda, a Reader’s Digest addict, has roomfuls of magazines and almanacs to show for her naive faith that someday she’ll open her door to a giant-check-wielding quasi-celebrity and a bunch of balloons. All I got was a two-dollar swindle and the pleasure of receiving up to five “important” “personal” “priority” “certified” “registered” “winner’s notification” letters a day, for about two months.

Lady Stardust’s letter was one of the last and strangest I received, and the only one I kept. It was the least bombastic and mercenary-seeming, though it was clearly designed to prey upon the lonely, the failing, the miserable, the self-pitying (not an exclusive club, I realize, though at the time it spelled me, me, me, and me). I liked it because it made absolutely no promises: it was superbly, unassailably vague. For years I misremembered and thought that the Lady had ambiguously claimed to be in league with “a friend in the U.S. government.” But upon re-reading it today, I realize that she cites only “an associate in the United States,” which is even more wonderfully fuzzy. Lady Stardust had perfected the discourse of flattering, comforting, sympathetic deception that is the lingua franca of the sweepstakes industry, and too often, sadly, is the same language in which we speak to our friends and ourselves.

I never did get my lucky numbers, nor the prosperity Lady Stardust coyly promised. Instead, I moved to New York City and went into publishing. This was not the best paying job in the world. The credit-card debt mounted further, and during the greatest sustained economic boom in history, I rarely made more than twenty grand, and often much less. I quit my job this past summer, just in time for the dot-com-fattened market to wither suddenly, and a new recession dawns with a bleak blue light on the horizon. Email has given new life to the sweepstakes con game, and my in-box has just now started to be flooded by new promises of unearned wealth.

Tomorrow, our week of collaboration between Open Letters and Other People’s Mail continues with another letter provided to me by one of my associates in the United States. All I can say is beware.

Sincerely,

Abby Bridge