Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Dear Andre,

May I call you Andre?  Fantastic.  I have zero complaints about your hotel except that I have to leave it eventually.  I’m sure I will be homesick for room 24 for the rest of my life, which is a very dismal fate if you think about it.  I’m sure someone has suggested this to you before, or perhaps you’ve even done it, but I do think you should consider having a writer-in-residence, which is a very trendy thing to do these days.  A few examples of places where they’ve recently had writers-in-residence:

1. Heathrow Airport

2. AmTrak Trains

3. The Betsy Hotel in Miami

4. Governor’s Island, NYC

#3 I participated in last year, and I begin a residency at #4 in about a week.

Now I get that you and your venerable institution are likely above trends, but hear me out: despite being mostly poor, writers are terribly cool, and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said (somewhat despairingly) they “can cause trouble like no one else can.”  Take me, for example––I am fantastic both personally and professionally, and if you’re thinking it’s sort of gauche that I just came right out and said that, let me assure you I can back it up.  I’ve been python hunting in the Everglades, serenaded by Tony Danza playing the ukulele, and written about Anne Sexton (poet, suicide)’s long lost rock band.  I’ve lived in a bookstore in Paris, written for [redacted], and composed hundreds of letters like this, in which I laid bare my foolish heart, full of lust for old hotels.*  I’m obsessed with religion but I write a mean snarky blog post.  I have no social media.  Most likely an intern will read this (I’ve been there, my unpaid friend!) and scoff at my stupidity, but this pool, with its trees full of fat lemons, has an Elysian quality to it, which means that if this residency doesn’t work out, I’ll perhaps get a chance to come back here when I die.

Love,

ID

Somewhere

*As regular readers you will notice that I have only about five good stories, which makes me uncool, but Andre doesn’t need to know the truth.