Last week someone sent me a chain letter. I hate chain letters. I hated them when I was young, because they were full of threats that involved believing that your luck was going to change for the worse if you broke the chain. I always broke the chain: I believed that the concept of luck was a countervailing force to atheism, and I was seriously into atheism.
When I got older, I began to believe in luck, although not in God. Meanwhile the personal assistant was invented, and chain letters made a comeback. There was a period in the l980s when they arrived in the mail about once a week, but they weren't true chain letters -- they were thick packets of paper, each page of which contained a list of ten close friends of the people involved in the packet. These letters were meant to have a kind of Six Degrees of Separation charm, but to me they were mostly about name-dropping, and they mostly proved that the people involved were so powerful that they could order their personal assistants to Xerox pointless chain letters.
Then of course, came life in the era of the internet and the chain letter morphed once again -- into the joke that is forwarded, the internet address that must be checked out, the dick in a box, the cat in the washing machine, the parody of Apocalypto. A good thing about this era's chain letter is that it doesn't have to be forwarded at all, it's just a communication you receive and can do with what you want; what I usually do with it when I see the word "Fwd:" in the message subject box is to not even bother to open it because it will clutter up my Desktop, or worse, cause my hard drive to crash, which is my idea of what might happen if I believed in a vengeful God who cared about chain letters.
But anyway, as I said, someone sent me a chain letter last week. It was a recipe chain letter. It seemed harmless enough, and I'm a cook, so I forwarded it to ten friends, along with a nice tomato sauce recipe. Eight of my friends broke the chain, and one of them is my agent, so that gives you an idea of how much power I have over my friends. The other two forwarded my chain letter to their ten friends -- but only one of them was powerful enough to cause her ten friends to send me recipes, one of which is for Chicken Divan With asparagus, a recipe that was a special favorite of Tricia Nixon's. Although she made hers with broccoli.
But I also received a response that wasn't a recipe at all but another chain letter entirely. It's probably been floating around the Internet for years, but I've never seen it. And I'm posting it here, even though I hate chain letters, but I can't help it. As they say in the subject box, "Fwd: this one is really good":
Dear Friends,
This chain letter was started in hopes of bringing relief to tired and discouraged women.
Just send a copy of this letter to five of your female friends who are equally tired and discontented. Then bundle up the man in your life, send him to the woman whose name appears at the top of the following list, and then add your name to the bottom of the list.
When your turn comes, you will receive 15,625 men. One of them is bound to be better than the one you already have. At the writing of this letter, a friend of mine had already received 184 men, all of whom were better than the sad example she started out with.
An unmarried woman living with her widowed mother was able to choose between a Chippendale dancer and an Olympic swimmer.
You can be lucky, too, but DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN! One woman broke the chain and got her own husband back!
So let's keep it going, ladies! Just add your name and address to the list below:
Laura Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC