Cindy Salach, boho in her black sweater, black tights, faded gray cutoffs, and short blond hair with two-inch black roots, walks down from her seat in the auditorium, steps up to the mike, flashes a quick smile, and says, “I’m going to read some love letters from second grade and fourth grade, sixth grade and high school. The first letter is from second grade. I know it by heart. ‘Dear Cindy, Kevin and Doug think you’re fat. But I think you’re just right. Love, Tom.’”
It’s clear that Salach, a veteran poetry slammer and cofounder of the performance group known as the Loofah Method, participates in the Letters Show for the sheer love of performance.
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Other readers seem to have mixed motives. An actor named Edward reads a rather bitchy, slander-filled (and hilarious) letter to purge what he describes as the “two acid-bath-like years” he spent at the DePaul theater school.
“I apologize for the randomness of numbers.”
“Are you reading?” Hauptschein shoots from the podium.
Hauptschein reaches into the bag and pulls out a slip of paper. “David Kodeski!”
Kim, a blond woman in a T-shirt and jeans, a yellow highlighter hanging from her collar, steps onto the stage and unfolds a gigantic piece of light yellow paper. “I was married when I received this letter from a coworker. This was the same time he sent nude Polaroids of himself to all the secretaries, before he was sent to the psychiatric ward at Saint Joseph’s.” On the paper is drawn the Sears Tower, with a long car ramp leading to the observation deck. “The caption reads that in order to make the ramp level enough to be driven on, it would have to be 400 miles long.” Kim then turns the paper over and begins reading a letter so long, manic, and continually digressive, it’s impossible to assemble my notes of it into a coherent facsimile of a letter: “Think it’s possible to fill this entire construction sheet?… I want to make you squirm. Ha!… And I’m doing it to you. Prematurely, natch. You won’t see me writing like this near the bottom of the page, because I’ve got more control…. I’d really like to write about sleeping with you…. Maybe I can fill up the whole page with “I don’t know what to say.”
