Dear Angel

Dear Angel,

I know it's been awhile, and I just thought I'd drop you a line. I guess congratulations are in order -- it seems like your career is really taking off. You're probably not aware of it, but I actually there at your show in Houston last October. I'd seen the ad -- I still think the picture of you frozen in the block of ice is misleading -- and I drove up to the Expo Center. I still don't know how you can stand to be shut up in that mummy's tomb of ice for hours on end, but that just goes to show what a dedicated performer you are. I stood in line with all the others coming out of the boat show, and when the line progressed up the steps into your refrigerated trailer, a hush fell over everyone like they were stepping into the inner sanctum of some famous tomb. They stared at the ice case, at the air hoses and phone lines running in and out, and one by one they kneeled there before your little plexiglass window.

I remember the first time I saw you like that, wearing your gold bikini and reclining on a sheet of ice, nonchalantly chatting on the phone with some radio station, your blonde hair falling over your shoulders, as you winked at someone tapping on the glass. Those were good days.

I don't know what happens to people, other than they drift apart. I always believed in you, but maybe I just wasn't supportive enough. It doesn't really matter now, does it? I've got my life, and I know whenever I see searchlights at a car dealership, a gun & knife show, or a new discount center on the edge of a town; chances are you'll be there in your frozen sarcophagus, resting in that Day-Glo trailer. Giving the world something that they may not always understand, but will dream about forever.

PS Just east of Tucson, on the edge of Texas Canyon, there's a tourist attraction called "The Thing." You see the signs for it in over two hundred miles in each direction. When you get there, you go through this museum of oddities and curios in a series of corrugated tin buildings. At the end of all this, in a glass case on a couple of sawhorses, is The Thing. Under the glass is the mummified remains of a woman holding an infant. Everything has turned iron-gray with the passage of time, and it's impossible to tell where the skin stops and the shrouds they're wrapped in, start. They were found in a cave, and are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of years old. The woman's face is turned to the sky with this look I can't describe. And the truck drivers, the Boy Scout troops and Border Patrol agents file past, looking at them and finding a riddle that none of them will ever solve.

Just like you, Angel. Sealed in your traveling ice age. Filing your nails and giving the DJs the same old inane stories about hypnotic states, mind over matter, or whatever. I never doubted you, and now I know beyond any doubt that there's a future for you. And even if you never speak to me again, I feel lucky to have known you.

Love Always