Until recent times, artists and writers, musicians and movie stars, mostly maintained an impenetrable barrier between themselves and their fans. This barrier was recognized and respected and, for a time was one of the constants of 20th century society. Many of us loved Paul Newman, but none of us hung out with him, or with Barbra Streisand, or Bob Dylan.

But sometime around the end of the 20th century, this wall of privacy that surrounded the star class began to crumble. I believe there are many reasons for this: the Internet, with its egalitarianism, that levels the playing field fo everyone who uses it and puts anybody with an email address within easy reach; the fragmentation of popular culture generally, so that not everyone hears the same musicians, or watches the same television programs, or sees the same movies, making the competition to attract an audience more fierce than ever before. And then there's that cost-cutting, Warholesque entertainment commodity known as "reality programming". Starring the very most obscure and desusional in our society,  reality programming puts anybody and everybody in line for their fifteen minutes of fame, from the worst caterwauling singer to the most demented families. Once a fellow is recognizable to the masses for sobbing "Leave Britney alone!" in what, in an earlier era would be an obscure video performance, he may in fact become a bigger celebrity than a character acter who has been working at his craft for 20 years. YouTube nation, indeed.

Some seek personal fame through their actions, while others seek only to participate, to take part in the great debate by writing letters to the editor. For these people, a published letter, especially if their letter is answered by the object of their attention, can be like a night of dancing with the stars.

I'm someone who, although I hold strong opinions, never writes his congressman. I never bother to take my complaints to a city council meeting. I never call the local television station to investigate a grave injustice.

But I do like to touch people in high places, people whom I admire for their work or for their talent, and with whom I feel a rapport , or simply those whose songs or words have touched me.And in more cases than one would suppose, these people often answer back. From the powerful and famous, I have received email from Joe Scarbrough, among others whose names I cannot remember. Wait, maybe it was just Joe Scarbrough.

I first wrote a fanhappy letter, I said a letter, to Butch Hancock, a local singer-songwriter and poet, whose songs are unmatched in artistry and language. He never wrote back. I wrote Mike Kelley, a newspaper columnist, to tell him my funny green house story. He didn't write back, either. I'm sure they are both very busy.

But one time, I watched a wonderful concert at a local fall festival by Emily Kaitz. Later, I wrote her a letter. She wrote me back, and sent a tape of some unrecorded songs, related to a Web site I maintain. I followed up with email, and she kept replying for quite some time, until, at some point, she said "enough, already!".

In 1999, I wrote a note to Suck.com, a popular Web site during the first Internet boom, and received a posted reply from one of their premiere writers, Polly Esther. I wrote again, and again a reply was posted on the site. I continued to write weekly letters to Polly Esther, until Suck.com went out of business. After those two replies, Polly went back to what she was doing. Later, I learned that Heather began to worry I might be some sort of obsessive Internet stalker. Later, she decided I was a harmless moron, and even encouraged me, by suggesting I send her any further emails at her address, so the rest of the editors would stop reading them.  (You know who you are... Tim!)

Because at some point, I had stopped writing for publication. I was writing simply to respond to the voice of Polly Esther, a voice that spoke to me, the voice of a writer into whom I projected a friend who could listen and hear my voice.

To we, The Obscure, it is easy to delude ourselves into believing that we have something to offer to the world, to say to the world, to present to the world. To be able to offer, to say, to present to someone who does have access, who is an artist, a musician, a star, is validation that we do have something going on, that we might actually be able to write that novel, or that song, or that sonnet.

I am on the other end of this phenomenon as well, sort of. Since 1997, I have maintained a Web site, where all the most wondrous Christmas music is reviewed and presented to the world. It began as a lark. I just wanted to build a unique, quirky Web site (good Web sites must be quirky and unique!) to learn the basics of Web publishing, and at the same time feed an addiction to Christmas music that had grown up around my child-centered family life. So, I would write artists and record labels, soliciting their music. And, lo, they would send it to me--free! And in return, I posted a review, and a link to their Web site. Many sites grew up during those times, just like mine, featuring any number of products or ideas. Christmas music was among the strangest of them all, I believe, and many of the artists who sent me their music were, by any measure, even more obscure than I am. Fact of the matter is, in the realm of holiday music  recordings, the most obscure and kitschy niche market  imaginable, I am king. More than once, I have given positive feedback to songwriters who only needed a little bit of encouragement in order to keep going with their creative process. 

I have a friend who has taken his fan obsession much further. A fan of a singer-songwriter of great renown, he has tried to penetrate  this singer's inner circle of friends. A local actor himself, he thinks that this credential levels the playing field, that it makes the relationship symmetrical. I think it is delusional for him to think that he, a music fan, can forge a long-term friendship with the object of his obsession. He disagrees, choosing to pursue this friendship as far as it takes him, to the possible detriment of more symmetrical relationships.

In addition to my correspondence with Emily Kaitz, I found other singers who aren't too busy or too famous to write back. MySpace was a particularly good way of making contact with recording artists and bands. I learned a lot from writing to Shannon Worrell and Myshkin, a couple of great, though not particularly well-known, singer-songwriters.They both wrote me back, Worrell to tell me details related to particular songs I love. Myshkin's songs are transparent to me. She has much stricter boundaries and maintains the musician/fan boundary while at the same time responding to me as a person.

 The indefatigable Joan Walsh has made a cottage industry of responding to all of her friends.Some people are just built to respond. We are all Joan's friends here. And she is a personal friend of Joe Scarbrough.

Meanwhile, I continued to carry on a "conversation" with Polly Esther for several years, through changes in her on-line persona--from Polly, to the rabbit (and that other avatar she took on, briefly, that we won't mention here), to Heather Havrilesky---and allowing me brief glimpses into her personal life, such as the time when she sent me a picture of her husband and her newborn child. Before Salon.com revised its letters policy, I played a brief role as an informal moderator of HH's I Like To Watch letter page, attempting through my own letters to enforce and encourage a level of civility in the Salon letters, carrying out a one-man crusade against misogynistic, attention-seeking trolls. 

But mainly, I allowed this relationship to continue in order to tell this person things that I didn't want to tell the people in my real life, especially those things I found difficult to share with my wife or with my therapist. One time, when we were introspecting on our "friendship", Heather suggested that I was expressing a need to feel "completely understood". And I think this sums it up nicely. Heather became a sounding-board, a non-judgmental enigma where I could project exactly the sympathetic and understanding individual I needed to tell my deepest fears and best-kept secrets.Lucky for me, she turned out to be a kind and understanding person who didn't mind receiving the mail, and who was generous enough with her time to respond in kind, from time to time. I believe, though she never confirmed, that there were a lot of people whose responses to her writing were not so dissimilar to my own.

This projection of Heather I created also managed to tap into my deepest creative impulse. At one point, I wrote a series of sonnets about "her". I believe she enjoyed receiving these, but at some point she asked me to stop, because she didn't recognize the person in the sonnets. Which suggests that in relating to others as fans, especially where we only have their words, their songs and their images to work with; the real person may not closely resemble our projection of them. Heather became to me what has often been called a muse.

But it became tiresome over the years to do most of the talking. Occasionally, she would write me, responding to something I said, offering advice, sharing stories about her own life and problems, usually when I least expected it. These responses were always welcome, though I eventually began to feel they were a tease, offering just enough feedback to keep me hooked into the cycle. That isn't really fair, though. She was kind throughout, and she certainly made it plain early on that she didn't have time to write back with any frequency. I am truly grateful that this person found a place for me, however small, in her universe. Through this particular asymmetrical relationship, I learned from her and I gained a deeper understanding of myself.

Earlier this year, I swore off all asymmetrical relationships, and  now choose to focus my attention solely on people in the real, or when online, with people who routinely write back, people who occasionally call me for lunch, people who, in a word, hold up their end of things. That's why Open Salon is such a wonderful outlet for me. I need to write; I need to relate. And we are all on an equal footing here. Some are better writers than others, but we share a basis for a writer/reader relationship. All things considered, I like this type of relating much better.