Aug 222017

 

Hi out there, Steve Burns! It’s me, Bri!

MAIL TIME! MAIL TIME! MAAAAAAAAIIIIIL TIIIIIIIIIIIME!

If you want to dance and bop around and wag your tail and all that, you may well get it out of the way right now~ I’ll wait, I don’t mind. After all, you did just get a LETTER and it’s going to be the best letter ever!

My name is Brianne Sloan, pleased to meet you! I’m so happy you’re not dead! Sadly I was a bit too old for Blues Clues (I was more of a Pinwheel/ Sesame Street/ MacGyver gal myself), but I had cousins. Every year, I got a new cousin and they ALL watched Blues Clues seven hundred and forty three times a day, every day.

Every. Single. Day.

Then running the same episode three times a day, every day for a week? That was particularly cruel, Steve, thank you very much. I so looked forward to Mondays, when there would be a brand new super sugary and duper dopey episode, though mostly I remember when you were listed as one of People’s Most Eligible Bachelors! No offense, but even at sixteen, I thought that had to be some kind of sick joke.

Not that you weren’t a bubbly Playground Adonis in your own right! In own your doltish, dunderheaded, exuberantly featherbrained sort of way! Not that you didn’t have all those rosy cheeked, pigtailed ragamuffins breathlessly chanting your name and shaking in their Tinkerbell tennies! It was Beatlemania for kindergarteners, not even *I* will deny you that! Probably ended your acting career too, but oh! Wasn’t it worth it!?

So why am I writing you? Easy. I need a million dollars.

(A clue! A clue!)

Will you help me? You will?! GREAT!

***

Before you skidoo right on out of here, listen up! I’ve got this summer blogging project where I am writing millionaires to ask for a million dollars and originally you weren’t on the radar at all~ come on! Then the other night, I had a six pack from Jekyll Island and I sat down in my drinking chair to drink, drink, driiiiiiink! God only knows what possessed me, but about four beers in, I started wondering Wow! Whatever happened to STEVE from Blues Clues?!

Assuming you were probably alive and well and eating Pop Rocks somewhere with Mikey, I Googled and searched and clicked in a frenzy til I found you! Boy oh boy! Did I ever find you!

Nobody puts Stevie in the crapper, huh?

When I first found the poop video, you reminded me a little of serial killer Rodney Alcala on the dating game, but the more I watched, the better it got! The beets? The poo haiku? Classic, Steve! Just classic! I loved it! I showed my mom, I showed my friends! I sent it to my grandma in Chicago!

Did you hear about the constipated accountant? He just couldn’t budget!

Har, har, har.

So I figured any man who can get away with singing a wildly catchy song about a socially unutterable anal excretion just HAS to be a millionaire! Heck, you’ve probably got ten million and change stashed in your Thinking Chair, waiting for a rainy day! Well, THIS is that rainy day, brother! It’s pouring! Steve Burns, here’s a clue~ YOU might be my new best friend!

Now this is the part where I usually hit the millionaire with a sob story about losing everything I owned in Hurricane Matthew and being sued by Capital One, then being threatened with jail time, jail time, JAILLLLLLLL TIIIIIIIIIME. All of this is sadly true, but HERE I am going to try a different approach!

***

Steve Burns, I love you! This may come as a surprise to you because all I’ve ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I’ve loved you for twenty years now and every second, more. I can’t fight it any longer! I was but a maiden of twelve when I first saw those satiny brown bedroom eyes of yours peeping out a hokey animated window and even then, I looked beyond your dorky bike helmet hair! At once I realized you were the only man for me!

All the better, you had your own house and dog already, you even cooked your own meals! Naturally I thought you were doing pretty well for yourself, that you could easily support me and my Pixie Stick addiction!

Oh, how you would call to me! Beckon me! Summon me to the window in your pseudo iconic rugby shirt and your ginormous pleated balloon pants! You lit a fire in me, the way you moved in those pants! Wearing them should have been illegal, my heart would skip ten beats every time I glimpsed you!

Then your mail dance? The MAIL DANCE?! My god, Steve, it was practically a striptease! The way you’d stamp your feet and wag your tail?

Oh, haaaaaaaaaaave mercyyyyyyyyy!

And you were a tease! Oh, how you were a tease! The torture! The pain! The sheer, undiluted pain, like a thousand salt shakers being jabbed into my heart! All the love letters I sent you, all the poems?  You never wrote me back! NEVER! I too waited by the mailbox for years and years, but I never once got to wag my tail! Many a night, I just sobbed myself to sleep in exquisite agony, my arms curled tightly around a plush Blue I’d swiped from my cousin! Only in my wildest flights of fancy would we ever dance the mail dance together.

When all of a sudden, you LEFT! Without warning at all, you threw me over for a lousy hopscotch scholarship, went gallivanting across the world with the Harlem Globe Hoppers! Oh, you brute! You swine! After everything we’d been through too! All the mysteries we’d solved together, all those magical colors we’d identified! The numbers we’d counted to, the glorious numbers! I shiver to remember!

And Joe? JOE?! What a dirty trick, Steve! What a filthy switch a roo! How could you double cross me like that? Was I not supposed to notice? Was I not supposed to care? He didn’t have your fire, he didn’t have your heat! He didn’t have your stars in his eyes and he certainly could not fill your grotesque pleated playground pants!

So if I can’t have YOU, Steve Burns, will you please send me ONE MILLION DOLLARS?

(A clue! A clue!)

Isn’t this the least you can do for all the trauma you’ve caused me? For all the damages and broken hearts and decades of therapy?! The wounds of adolescence may take years to heal . . . but I am willing to bet that a million dollars might help me sweep up the shattered remains of my heart! Then hopefully I’ll be able to move on and find someone in some nice dungarees or chinos or something.

Now it’s time for so long! Still I know that right now at this very second, you’re using your mind, taking one digit at a time and getting out your handy dandy . . . checkbook.

*YOU* JUST FIGURED OUT BRI’S CLUES! YOU’RE SO SMART!

(I’ll also take cash or a money order! I’m flexible!)

Adieu, Steve! Adieu!

Wish me a million dollars!

Brianne Sloan

       


Reader Comments

  1. August 23, 2017 at 7:14 am (Edit)

    “Nobody puts Stevie in the crapper”! Amazing.

    I think he has a similar enough sense of humor he’ll enjoy it!

  2. August 23, 2017 at 7:20 am (Edit)

    OMG this is hilarious!

    I can’t wait to read the next letters you’ll write!

    1. August 23, 2017 at 7:45 am

      Thank you, dahhhhhhhhhling, but it’s so much MORE than that! All these feelings have come rushing back and I actually think I might end up *marrying* this guy! Look at his passion! Look at the way he moves!

      Fabio, move over. There’s a new mailman in town. <3

  3. August 27, 2017 at 8:36 am

    really brianna? Ain’t he a college drop out who hasnot worked since the 90s? Good luck!

    But what if you ask all these guys each 4 a few grand each? Instead of asking fabios and broke puppetears for a fortune.

    1. August 28, 2017 at 12:41 pm

      And *you’re* a college graduate who drives an Uber and lives rent free with your grandma. All I’ve learned from you is how NOT to make a million dollars and believe me-

      I already know how to do that. <3

      Anyway writing this was a blast, who the heck cares if he gives me a million dollars?

      Kid earned every penny he ever made too, babysitting was *never* so easy!

      1. August 29, 2017 at 12:45 pm

        That’s panhandling. I have dignity.

        Kermit is a puppet. Lambchop is a puppet. Blue is a drawing, she’s an enchanted, frolicking likeness.

        The End.

  4. September 3, 2017 at 8:46 pm

    Did you hear from Blue? You sang the mail song in all the time, in high school, you haven’t changed much anyway. THIS will work? Its so out on right field!

    I will not expect a dime for Bruce Jenner. rewrite that before you send it.

    1. September 7, 2017 at 7:45 pm (Edit)
      Bruce Jenner was a throwaway letter, I did not put much stock into that. On the other hand, Stevie took me three days~ I did all my homework, Steve Burns took some massive digging.

      No, I did not hear from Blue yet, he lives in Brooklyn~ there are no hurricanes in Brooklyn. I should have done this before Hurricane Harvey, I feel a little lousy using Matthew as a sob story now. IRMA is the threat today, they’re giving out free sandbags at St. Francis Field. Last year, nobody gave me a freaking sandbag, but would it have even helped?

      Boo hoo. I guess this is the price we must pay to live in Florida.

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