Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Dear T,

Cut to: three years later.  I’ve been writing in one capacity or another since I graduated from school.  I’ve been slaving over a book for a few years, which in the next year or so will finally come to fruition.  I’ve done tiny freelance work, written bar reviews, worked for a literary agent, contributed to magazines, helped transcribe and edit interviews for the souvenir book for the Broadway musical Xanadu! (That was actually pretty hysterical, and if I ever get famous I think someone ought to “discover” that piece and declare it my unsung masterpiece.  I can send it on if you want, which you know you do…)   I just wrote a piece for a New York-based magazine called Ghost about hunting Burmese python in Florida’s Everglades, as I’m living in Miami right now with my boss, a very successful, very Italian true crime writer who has Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  My duties for him are numerous: edit, take dictation, research, act as surrogate child for him and wife, feed and clothe and operate ventilator as needed, boost ego every 1-3 seconds, and answer phone in case one of his pals, most of whom acted on The Sopranos, calls (art imitating life imitating…)   Imagine Tuesdays with Morrie if Morrie were a wannabe mafioso.  Actually, BA suggested the title of my book about this experience be Tuesdays with Fucking Morrie, but we’re both assuming Mitch Albom would sue.  For her part, Becca has been nurturing the the souls of tomorrow teaching nursery school up at our alma mater and writing a column about love and relationships (yes, like Sex and the City, sans the insipid questions.)  She’s beginning work on her PhD in clinical psychology in the fall and wants the chance to scribble down all the short stories that have been brewing inside her brain before she has to turn her attention to papers and theses.  She can think of no place better to write without limits than in the city that most inspires her, in a place whose very foundation is inspiration.

The point: we desperately want to come stay at Shakespeare and Company.  We will sleep in any of the little beds in the shop, and in fact, will only take up one as a pair.  Consider us one blond sprite, not two.  We are both very small and nimble and willing to work late hours pouring hot tea for thirsty bards or ringing up purchases made by silly American college students who remind us of what we used to be, once upon a time.  We will pray to the texts originally owned by Sartre and de Beauvoir, and cry tears of literary joy by the banks of the Seine at night.  We will be oh-so-grateful to add this to our poetic resumes (between “hunted for twenty foot snakes in swamps in the name of narrative” and “fell in love doing the Proust Questionnaire in the wee hours.”)  We are lucky to have sampled once from the movable feast while we were young, but I hate to say it: we’re still hungry.

So…will you have us?  And if so, when can we come?  We can be ready at the drop of a pillbox hat.

Regardless of the answer…

Nous t’aimons,

ID and BA

PS If it would increase our chance of being welcomed, we’d be happy to print out this note, soak it in tea bags to give it that antiquated look, spritz it with perfume (Guerlain?  Chanel?) and deliver it by mail.