That was the day Reggie showed up waving an envelope in my face and screaming, “Fan mail!”
It was a handwritten note—pencil, printed letters, lined paper—from a boy in Minnesota named Gary. There were four sentences. One of them read, I think you are the most beautiful female I ever saw!!! The last one read, I give you a 99!!! The highest score on Bandstand’s Rate-A-Record was 98.
No homework assignment was ever more intensely scrutinized than those four sentences.
“I think? Why not know?”
“Most beautiful!”
“Ever saw!”
“Ninety-nine!”
“Three exclamation points!”
We must have read it in chorus ten times.
We even studied the envelope. It had been originally sent to the Bandstand studio address on Market Street in West Philly. They had forwarded it to Reggie.
“Now you’re like Tommy D and Justine and Bob!” I gushed. Her muted “I know” told me she had long since thought of that.
“And maybe you’ll get your own fan club!”
“I know.”
I wound up and heaved the next one as far down the road as I could. “Maybe even a magazine!”
Bingo. Her eyes went wide. “Y’think?”
“Heck, yeah,” I told her. “By this time next year they could be selling your magazine—”
“My fan magazine—”
“—selling your fan magazine at the newsstand across from the P&W.”
“At Care’s Drug Store!”
I gestured at the world. “Everywhere! Coast to coast!”
“Like Seventeen!”
We had to stop and catch our breath. Give the future a chance to catch up.
She clutched my arm. “What’s it gonna be called?”
“What else?” I said. “Reggie! With an exclamation point.”
She fished in my eyes for a moment until she saw the cover. “Reggie!” she whispered solemnly. And then she was clutching my arm again, hard this time. “Oh my God…oh my God…”
“What?” I said.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” She was looking through Gary’s note to somewhere else.
“What?”
“Where it all leads.”
I grabbed her arm. “Where?
She mouthed a word silently with her Passion Pink lips. I didn’t understand it. I shook her. “Say it!”
She said it: “Broadway.”
I joined her, looking through the penciled paper in her hand. And then I saw it, too: the long tunnel of time passing through mountains of fan mail, newsstands hawking Reggie!, screaming fans reaching for a touch—and there, at the end of the tunnel, velvety curtains swinging open to reveal…“Reggie Weinstein!”…in a gingham frontier dress belting out a song from Oklahoma!
I slept over at Reggie’s most of that week. The mail arrived each day just before noon. Each day we sat on the curb in front of her West End duplex, breathlessly awaiting the mailman. When we spotted him turning the corner onto her block, we ran to him and babbled away until he reached her house.
The first day’s haul was three letters. One…three…we could feel the deluge mounting. I suggested framing them. Reggie sensibly pointed out that there wasn’t wall space in the whole block of houses for what was coming. Meanwhile she retrieved from the backyard trash a tall cardboard box that had housed the family’s new vacuum cleaner. With the swipe of a paintbrush she canceled out HOOVER and replaced it with FAN MAIL. It stood chest-high next to her bedroom dresser.
We were together morning, noon and night. If I had been Reggie’s doll before, I was now her audience, her witness. “Maybe someday you’ll write about this,” she said to me one day at Scooper Dooper. She had found out where New York City was and had taken to gazing dreamily in that direction, to Broadway, as if to Mecca. She did so now over her vanilla fudge double-dip, whispering in prayerful wonder, “A star is born.”
Two more fan letters arrived on the day after the three. Then none—well, it was Sunday. Then one. Then none. And none. And none. We were mystified. Too many were piling up at the Market Street studio, we theorized. They would bring them all at once, probably in a truck. We asked the mailman if there could be a mistake. Could he be delivering them to some other address from that leather pouch of his?
Ah, such rookies were we in the game of fame. In the space of that week Reggie Weinstein’s world—and by best-friend extension, mine—went from a planet to a pea.
Somewhere along the line we stopped waiting at the curb. We staggered in a fog of disbelief. My last moment in her bedroom is with me still. I’m looking down into the FAN MAIL box, which seems much deeper than the length of a vacuum cleaner. The daylight barely reaches the depths. The envelopes—seven—don’t even cover the bottom.