I wrote a lot of fan mail when I was a teenager
It's the mall's fault.
As brutalist as they came, suburban malls from the 90’s were also a cozy cocoon for teenagers like me. Our local shopping center was a preferred place for parents to drop-off their kids, compared to the basements of our friends. Basements didn’t have mall security to make sure we weren’t doing anything illegal (thanks for blowing up our spot That 70’s Show).
Ah, the mall… a bigger high school, with more places to hide, more opportunities to be seen. The poured concrete structure was a shelter for firsts. A false sense of freedom between parent drop-offs and pickups, but it was enough. When you are meandering around in those years between being autonomous and not old enough to drink, you take what you can get.
Some of my “mall firsts” include:
My first driving lesson. It’s midnight, I’m 15, and my dad and I are in the mall parking lot post massive snow storm. My dad says to me, “if you can do a donut with control, that’s all that matters.” I still can’t decide if that’s the worst or the best driving advice ever.
My first arrest. Still 15. A mall cop is reading me my rights after my friends and I imbibe in a silly-string fight. Yeah you read that right. Some of the neon fun stuck to the outside wall. They tried to charge us with vandalism, but didn’t have much to prove after that silly old string dried and blew away within the hour they detained us.
My first job. Jesus Christ, I’m still 15, am I ever going to get the hell out of here? A well-known Canadian coffee chain, employs me during their December rush. One morning I clumsily knock over an entire gallon of freshly brewed coffee. My reflexes kick into gear without processing. I cup my hands together to prevent the scalding coffee being lost to the drain. I burn them so badly the entire palm of my hand peels off like a sticker. The translucent palm print falls off my hand and clings to the bottom of the sink like a beached jellyfish. I don’t remember feeling any pain until my shift ends five hours later. Yeah, my boss doesn’t even think about letting me leave early, and my young impressionable brain doesn’t think to ask.
If you were wondering if I was one of those teenage girls with backbone, I wasn’t.
To be fair, I knew that my crush happened to be working in the same mall on the same day. He’d eventually need a coffee. I looked down at my fist full of gauze and whispered to myself, anything for you, _______. I promise that 1) I said that. 2) I don’t remember his name anymore, and 3) that he did exist. Here is a sketch of him from my ninth grade journal:
For my American folk, Laura Secord was a bangin’ ice cream shop in Canada.
Ok wow, so many questions virgin Coco. First of all, I guess you were into sideburns then? Why did you encircle him in rainbows? Why are you confused about not getting into art school?
The mall was also the place where I held my first autograph. True, I did go to Disney World that previous summer and asked Ariel, Goofy and Mickey to sign my autograph book, but that’s so incredibly embarrassing, I would never write about that publicly.
There was a stall just below the food court where you could get any autograph of any famous star at the time. They had books and books of glossy promo photos, signed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, the cast of Dawson’s Creek. If my ice cream scooping crush didn’t ask me how my day was, I could now just walk two minutes down the path and get lost in Elijah Woods’ eyes.
These autographs weren’t cheap. This was as close as a small-town Canadian girl would get to touching the ink, that touched the Sharpie casing, that touched David Duchovny’s hand. Unfortunately, my savings were nowhere near the ballpark of getting one anytime soon. I pondered this sadly while looking at Mulder’s steely gaze one afternoon when suddenly everything changed.
I turned the glossy photo of Duchovny around and I noticed a stamp on the back. It was a PO box in LA with the name Star something Talent on top. What was that? An address? I quickly thought of another show I loved and flipped to the Smallville section. Another stamp with an office name! Ok, now… Heath Ledger? No. freaking. way. I copied the PR office names without the stall attendant looking and ran home to dial up the internet. Guess what? In those early days of the Worldwide Web where there were only 3,177,453 webpages in total (today there are over 6 billion) every office address of any actor I could think of, was listed.
The addiction began there. I was laying the foundation for my new secret life. I always wondered how girls my age would “have mystery,” like all the magazines told us we needed. Some 16 year olds dabbled in malt liquor and smoking, I wrote love letters to Frodo Baggins.
My first non-celebrity crush was an obvious choice. Everyone in school thought he was good looking, and even though I said I disagreed, I liked that boy for years. He never spoke two words to me let alone looked at me from elementary school all the way through high school. That’s a lot of years to be invisible to someone.
His equally popular buddy (who’s equally lame now), nicknamed me pancake chest at recess when I was eleven. I am still confused about that one. There weren’t exactly big racks bouncing around our elementary school’s playground. That eventually morphed into a common shout from across the yard: “you know what’s flatter than your chest? Your face!”
Another boy who was “nice enough,” asked if he could choose my nick name on a school bowling trip. It was a sign of endearment I was sure, the beginning of our romance. I thought of our future first date as I tied my shoes. Then I heard the sniggering surround me. I look up and see BOK CHOY blinking for all the school to see. I quickly laugh with them. I don’t think to change it.
Unfortunately, at home, this all aligns with my parents divorce and some public awareness of my mom’s drinking problem. Get a DUI once, it’s secret gossip in a small community, get four in a row and get your license taken away? Public awareness.
Most people I know start tinkering with their social curiosities in that awkward 13-16 year old bracket. First romances, first dates, first parties, getting into trouble for the first time. But with all of the parties, rebellions and drinking happening in my home, I stayed on the straight and narrow. If you’re both unpopular and unwilling to do anything cool, you have little hope of flipping the narrative of who you are. Sadly my attempt at Gale Weathers’ chunky highlights did not help. Instead, I retreat deeply into all the things I can count on. Fantasy novels, movies, tv shows, and yes, writing fan mail.
If lived in my head before, I was lost completely in the clouds now. I wrote things down like, “If I moved to California, I know Elijah Wood would date me*.”
*Spoiler alert, I move to California in my 20’s and I never end up dating Elijah Wood. Also this is the exact same photo that I would sign and include in my envelopes to actors with this note attached: “I figured if ur sending me an autograph, U should have one of me 2.”
The first time I received an 8x10 envelope from Warner Brothers I felt like my world exploded open. I would smell the paper and try to imagine the view from the office it came from. I crouched on my front steps waiting for the mail to arrive. I opened signed portraits from the cast of Smallville, and letters from various PR firms thanking me for my letters. If an intern had written it, it didn’t matter, that intern didn’t live in Ontario.
Then, one day a signed photo of Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny from the set of X-Files was in my shaking hands. Appropriately in that moment I felt like an alien finally making contact with a new planet (ok, I went too far there, this is all a writing exercise if you didn’t know where the hell you were).
There’s such a huge wall that surrounds you in high school and it can fucking consume you. Go to all the malls you want, that concrete suburban fortress is poured thick. These letters drilled holes into that wall. I started walking my high school hallways with less worry, less weight. It didn’t matter what anyone thought of me, because I had reached my arm out of my beige teenage life, and touched the turquoise ocean.
Today confidence comes much easier to me so I have no problem offering up these anecdotes at a cocktail party or two. When I recount my penchant for writing fan mail, there’s always a laugh had. Shit, I laugh at myself all the time, but I never think that writing these letters made me a “loser.” It’s not something I grew out either, I still write emails or letters to people I admire. These little extra-curricular assignments shaped my relationship of how I saw success. I didn’t put these actors on a pedestal, I raised my own.
As I noted, this story isn’t about me finally meeting Elijah Wood (although I have a weird Ryan Gosling story to tell you one day), this story is about the first time I finally found the edge of the pool I thought I was drowning in.
Writing and receiving these letters were just the ticket for a fairly depressed teenager trying to find some confidence and meaning. They set a new standard of how I wanted to be heard. Having a famous actor on the other end of it was just a massive perk in the really not that complicated wish all teenage girls have, to be talked to.
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Always interested to hear what you think. That’s a lie, I don’t take criticism well, but I’ll play ball anyways…