Love Letters

I had the chance earlier this month to see one of Carol Burnett's last performances in Love Letters. She's a hoot, but what has stuck with me since the show is the letter writing. We've all written letters, like maybe once or twice, to a childhood friend when we moved away or to a family member going through a rough patch, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about years. I'm talking about sharing our lives with someone through regular written correspondence.

Love Letters is easily the simplest show I've ever seen on Broadway. It follows the lives of a man and woman using nothing more than the letters they wrote to each other over the course of a lifetime. From childhood birthday parties to the complexities and heartbreak of adulthood, they cry, they laugh, they dream, they hope, they hurt each other, they love each other. It's a show that really examines the power of such correspondence...especially in this abbreviated and instant society we live in. Think about the last time you actually wrote someone a letter. Was it this year? This decade?

I've had stints of this kind of correspondence....two of my siblings have spent multiple years abroad where the only way I could communicate with them was to write letters, and it's not just that the letters themselves act as a kind of journal for my life (and theirs) during those years, it's that this kind of communication really strengthens bonds. I find that I miss it, the letters. I miss having someone to write. I miss having something more substantial than bills and ads in my mailbox. Which is what prompted tonight's purchase on my rainy walk home. Some of you (I'd say about 80) will be getting letters. Feel free to write back.