I recently cleaned out our filing cabinet and was excited to come across an old file marked “Autographed Photos”.
The back story: when I was a kid, I loved getting mail. When I was eight, I even put an ad in the kids’ section of the Toronto Sunday Sun newspaper looking for penpals, and received over a hundred responses! Eventually that whittled down to a few with whom I corresponded for years, and I think I finally lost touch with the last one during university. Are you out there, Kristi?
But another way to receive mail, as I discovered, was to write fan letters…and you may recognize the young All My Children star whose 1991 response is shown below:
While I assume the writing isn’t hers, the response was personalized to the questions I asked, and I’m pretty sure it’s an authentic autograph (not shown – couldn’t snap it without showing you my parents’ home address!) It’s also postmarked New Jersey, where Kelly is originally from.
Little did the gorgeous Ms. Ripa know that 20 years later, not only would she still be gorgeous, but she would have the opportunity to meet me in person on the set of a little talk show called Live With Regis and Kelly! (Gelman took this photo; just FYI.)
This will be such a neat artifact to pull out when I’m a special guest co-host on the show in the future, right? I’m actually still holding out on doing a Momterview with Kelly some day. She fits right in with my other celebrity Momterview subjects as a woman who’s talented and successful in her career while also raising a family, and I’m sure her Canadian fans want to know more about her. Come on, Kelly, what do you say?
How about you, dear readers? Have you ever written a fan letter? To whom? Did you receive a response?
My daughter wrote a letter to Dalton McGuinty (when she was a student in your class). He wrote back a very nice personal letter. Who knows if it was really him, but until recently, the letter had a place of honour on the wall in our mudroom, along with the other works of art that come home from school.
With the introduction of Bill 115, the letter was removed from its place of honour out of consideration for the teachers who come through our doors 🙂
That is a great story! Happy you got a chance to meet Kelly Ripa years later.
I too had lots of pen pals from all over the world.
I've sent fan mail to a favourite band I loved, Menudo -from Puerto Rico, but I never received a response.
Cheers,
~Dreena~