Not Just Un-Famous Fan Letters

I write fan letters but I've never written one to anyone famous. Does that make sense?

Lemme explain.

I never wrote a fan letter to an actor or singer because I thought, "Well, plenty of people are writing those people. What about everyone else?"

So, I wrote letters to people like the customer service representative who took care of a problem for me, or my insurance agent (which reminds me, I need to send a letter to the adjuster that looked at our car). I even wrote a fan letter to a police officer who gave me a ticket for having a busted headlight.

I think that's a good example of a good un-famous fan letter.

In that letter I wrote something along the lines that she had a pretty thankless job, especially that part of it. That I was sure most people thought along the lines that she was just being a pill issuing the ticket and she might get comments like, "Why are you out here messing with me? Shouldn't you be catching real criminals and actually protecting people like me?" But the truth is she was protecting me. If I have a headlight out, I need to be told about it. Unfortunately, however, loads of people aren't motivated to fix things like that unless there is a penalty for not having done so. The ticket makes us fix the problem right away because we're afraid of getting another ticket. If I didn't fix that headlight and the other failed, I'd be in really big trouble. So, even though it didn't seem like it, she was protecting me and I appreciated her doing her job so well.

I try to send out letters like this on a regular basis, especially to people like that police officer because they really do important work and they really don't get much in the way of recognition for it. Sometimes you have to hunt for a person or team to thank them but I'm sure people have to hunt down addresses to which they send their fan letters for actors, etc. So, it can't be that different.

Now, I love movies. Comedies, dramas, action movies, sci-fi, whatever, I'm just a huge film fan and I get what I call star crushes. I'll find an actor or actress that impresses me and I'll pretty much go through their body of work and also find out quite a bit about their background.

I watch their films and, if I can find them, even episodes of TV series in which they've appeared. I just like watching them play different roles and am generally pleased to see them wearing these different skins so effortlessly.

For some strange reason, reading about their lives prior to their careers is interesting to me and not creepy so I do it. I have no explanation really.

Maybe I think that before they became professional actors, they were out there living without a script. They weren't pretending, they were doing and I think that the doing part of their lives can sometimes be seen in the way they act later on.

I'm not sure that's logical or makes any sense at all but it's just how I feel about it.

Anyway, I recently developed a star crush on Jonathan Rhys Meyers and it has shifted my world view. I was reading about his past, which is very colorful, but also read a few quotes attributed to him. One of which was:

"It's not about money, fame, people knowing you. It's not even about enjoying yourself and being happy. It's about achieving something that's brilliant, creating something that's brilliant, for other people. For yourself, you're always going to be unsatisfied, but if somebody comes up to me and says, 'That was a brilliant part, and I really, really got it'. That's essentially it."

I thought about that. I also thought about another Jonathan: Jonathan Brandis.

I'm going to seemingly veer off topic right now but, trust me, it's related. Please bear with me.

Ahem.

I have asthma and have had asthma since childhood. Very early on I became disgruntled with how the media portrays asthma. For example: The Goonies. It's a brilliant film and I loved it but I cried at the end and here's why.

Goonies Ending

The end of that movie showed something that made me so angry. I've put a youtube clip here. It's in German and cuts off right as it gets to the part about which I'm speaking but I'm hoping it'll still remind people. Skip to the end of the little clip and you'll see Sean Astin's character fumble for his inhaler. The part that's cut out is him pausing, looking at it for a moment and then throwing it over his shoulder in a sort of, "I don't need this crutch anymore." way.

That's generally the way I saw asthma portrayed in the movies. I remember getting upset once that my asthma was bothering me and deciding that I would just get over it, like the kids in the movies did. It was all in my head, right? I had a very bad day that day because, like an idiot, I threw away my medicine.

Then I watched Sidekicks, starring Chuck Norris and Jonathan Brandis. It was a pretty typical karate kid clone with an asthmatic kid as the main character. However, the main character had asthma the way I had asthma. He didn't wheeze as he was breathing in, he coughed and struggled to expel air. The portrayal of asthma caught me with the first attack as his teacher says something like, "Don't fight it, Barry. Just let it happen." (Which sounds oddly pervy out of context....hmm.) Anyway...

That movie also made me cry but not out of anger and frustration at having someone, once again, show me a caricature of myself. I cried because after watching the scene I plugged in below I felt like someone else understood.

Sidekicks Scene

Just in case you can't view it, it essentially shows the main character going into an attack and throwing away his inhaler in frustration and anger. He yells, "I will beat you!" I'd felt that. Like the movies and shows I'd seen were telling me that I was supposed to be able to overcome my asthma somehow.

Then Barry, the main character, has a daydream/hallucination about being tortured by an evil man who uses twisting chains to crush his lungs. Barry says at one point I think, "I can't breathe!" and the torturer replies, "What do you care, Shrimp? You sound like a bagpipe when you do anyway."

Asthma isn't a joke or a punch line. It's a potentially fatal disease that makes it difficult if not impossible to breathe and these incredibly frightening attacks can occur without notice. I live with the fact that someone could dump some kind of cleaning solution into the vents of my office building (that's happened) or step onto an elevator with a perfume to which I'm allergic (also happened) and send me into an asthmatic attack that will land me in the hospital (um, yeah, the end result of both of those scenarios).

Consistently kids with asthma in movies are portrayed as nerds who really aren't sick but hide behind inhalers rather than get involved in anything too dangerous or scary. The opposite is true.

An asthma attack impairs your ability to breathe. Water boarding is considered torture because the fear of drowning, of not being able to breathe, is so very primal. Kids with asthma face this terrifying situation knowing the best way to get through it is to remain calm and "let it happen". Yet entertainers continue to portray kids with asthma as dorky, nervous, and even cowardly.

Watching Sidekicks, which showed a kid struggling with the disease, and with the isolation and inactivity having the disease had created, was incredible. I loved the fact that in the final scenes, when Barry is at the martial arts competition and Chuck Norris miraculously joins his team (it's a cheese fest of a movie) one of those scenes begins with him sitting on the sidelines and taking a hit off his inhaler. His asthma didn't magically go away. His medicine was treated like a crutch but not one behind which Barry hid, rather one that he had to learn to use properly in order to allow him to accomplish the things his disease made difficult.

I know the acting is dodgy and the storyline cheesy but I still love that movie because it made me feel good about myself. It made me feel like it was okay that I had asthma and that my asthma wasn't just in my head. As long as I believed it was just something in my head, I felt like every time I had trouble breathing or had to use my inhaler or had an attack that I was somehow failing.

I would love to write Jonathan Brandis a letter and tell him that. I would really love to let him know how important a movie he probably only thought of as dodgy and cheesy, was to me as a kid. I can't though.

Jonathan Brandis committed suicide in late 2003 at the age of 27. Thing was, I've seen films he did as an older actor. He was good. I mean, really good.

He had a decent sized role in Ride With The Devil, one of my favorite films of all time. If you watch that movie now you see it's an all around who's who of current 'it' actors and he was incredible in it.

He stood up with then less well-known or completely un-known actors: Tobey Maguire, Jeffrey Wright, Skeet Ulrich, James Caviezel, Simon Baker, Mark Ruffalo, & Tom Wilkinson, all of them being directed by Ang-freaking-Lee (I think that's officially how you're supposed to say his name) and there was Jonathan Brandis being fan-freaking-tastic.

Oh yeah, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (you thought I forgot about him, didn't you?) he was in that movie as well.

Jonathan Brandis was, without question, a talented actor. I knew that but I never told him.

I mean, he has a line in that movie: "Yeah, sounds like real good dirt to me." You'd think that line would be funny but he managed to make it downright poignant.

I don't presume to think that if I'd written Jonathan Brandis a fan letter as a child or later as an adult it would have somehow given him an added incentive to live. I have no idea what might have caused him to make that decision. But after reading what Jonathan Rhys Meyers had to say, I think his one time co-star, Jonathan Brandis, deserved to know how his work affected me. I thought he was a great actor and I now know that I shouldn't have assumed someone else would tell him that.

To that end, I hereby officially remove my fan letter restrictions and will start sending letters to the famous as well as the un-famous (not infamous). I think that I'll start with Mr. Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Hmmm.

Anyone have an address for the man?