Sacre (Red, White and) Bleu!
First, I would like to thank you for your contribution to another highly successful French Film Festival this week-end. However, I am afraid to report an ugly error in your ad poster that was screened in between films at the Byrd. Your ad was, I believe, meant to make three magazine covers look like the well known tri-color French flag, which is in blue, white, and red, from left to right. Unfortunately, your ad’s flag was arranged in red, white, and blue, which is ultimately the color scheme of the American flag. I was disappointed in how uneducated and illiterate this ad appeared to me as well as to the large portion of the audience from abroad and out of town. Please in the future verify the accuracy of any country’s flag you choose to portray as this ad stuck out like a sore thumb and made your magazine look rather illiterate.
Merci et thanks…

- Jeananne Turner

I’d love to take this one on the chin and jump on the sword for Mother France, but I can’t. Because you see, replicating the French flag wasn’t really what we were going for. Yes we used red, white and blue covers, but there was no plan to interpret the flag. So if we weren’t trying to do that which you have explained, we couldn’t have failed at it. Therefore we could not have committed an “ugly error.” Furthermore, your disappointment was unwarranted as was your perception of the ad as “uneducated and illiterate.” Consequently, your entire characterization of us was based in falsehoods, misunderstandings and confused delusions. As a result, we’d like you to take back all those mean things you said.

Typewriter Tirade
Welcome to Richmond’s permanently on-going decaying charm, where Southern grace breathes its dying breaths and the old families cling to the Country Club where they dream away what’s left of their aristocratic fantasy.
Where once our tender virginal “beauties” were formally introduced to their social peers at a ball given, it was believed, for the sheer purpose of raising funds for the charitable hospital on the North Side, Retreat for the Sick, they now are presented as “young women” who attend serious institutions of higher learning in order to become independent, responsible adults. No more pretensions there!
And where once the “City Fathers” lunched together at their traditional and oh-so-restrictive Commonwealth Club, they’ve succumbed to a few token new members whose family names reflect those of their ole massahs. We’ve made the transition from the 19th Century into the 20th Century and await that oh-so awesome jump into the 21st.
Our establishment tea rooms on Grace Street, The Chesterfield and Mrs. Morton’s served traditional lunches to the traditional people, all white, of course, as well as our two department stores, Thalheimer’s and Miller & Rhoades. Hats and gloves and jackets and ties according to propriety.
Richmond’s elite were safe and snug – “clean, safe and mutant-free” as your editorial describes the would-be downtown Richmond. That was the Richmond I knew. Over the years I’ve watched as court rulings forced our complacent racial snobbery to give way to integration. Tea rooms disappeared. Clubs accepted a few token members. Downtown dried up. Suburbs flourished. Private schools proliferated. And lo and behold, we even elected a multi-colored City Council. Oila!
But Richmond may look integrated. It’s not. Reluctantly, slowly, Richmond is a city of socially sealed-off enclaves of superficially connected citizens, appearing in public to be congenial, but privately, just as segregated and distant as always. We’re a schizophrenic, alienated, superficially united enclave searching for our own identity. So, do we truly want to “revitalize” our downtown? I think not.

- Zelda K. Nordlinger

I have almost no idea what that letter was about, but I can tell you that I’m absolutely charmed by the fact that you wrote it on a typewriter. You made a few little corrections in blue pen, mailed it in an envelope and actually typed the address. Again, no idea where you’re going with any of what’s written, but I’m positively tickled by the nostalgia you have aroused in me. I think I need some alone time with my Smith-Corona.

Bitter? No, just frustrated.
We have to stop hating knowledge and understanding in this country. We have to stop thinking that driving a big truck in a little city is cool. We have to stop refining and empowering our constant collective dis-satisfaction with the present. We need to teach kids to pursue happiness, not success.
I just don’t want us to die like squirrels, running from one illusion to the next, mouths open, blood cold, bodies clenched, with our claws empty of all the acorns they tried to push into a hole of need that can’t be filled with acorns.
I bet somewhere, under that mortgage, you realize now that you should have just stayed single and moved to the beach like you always wanted. Now your little family/corporation consumes ten times what’s necessary while producing ten times the waste. Every time you go through 3 types of packaging to get to the nutritionally devoid snack your giving to your spiritually devoid children, you get three steps further away from being a happy human animal, and one step closer to the Godless abomination of denial and self glorification.

- Jason

Happy Spring to you too, Mister Sourpants! Somebody needs a root beer float.

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