a candle to you.” I didn’t expect the sympathy. For a few years after my dad died, Momma held back a lot of her mothering, as if she’d forgotten that I was still mostly a child, one that might need a parental sort of guidance now and again. I don’t mean to say that I suffered from it. Not more than anyone else. Besides, I had Sandy, and I was always welcome at the Wilsons’ house for dinner.
And every so often, Momma would muster her energy, and there’d be all sorts of activity as she hurried to catch up on the months she hadn’t been paying attention. One such time coincided with my breakup with Howard Malkin. Momma was down in the basement, knee-deep in boxes of her and Dad’s old papers, when she looked up and told me that Howard Malkin was a pissant who would never amount to much. A minute later, she found the Pat Boone picture, and rattled off the story behind it: how she’d had a crush on Mr. Boone back when he was first starting out, how she had written to him and been sent a signed photograph in return.
Early on, I had found a picture of Joshua—a really good one in Soap Opera Digest where he was in a tank top—and I stuck it inside my locker door at school. I always kept an eye out for him in Soap Opera Digest and Daytime Drama Weekly and even People magazine, but in those first years, he didn’t get much coverage. He was certainly handsome enough, but that was back when the whole country was obsessed with the Jasper and Helen storyline and whether or not Jasper would come back before Helen married Bart. All that buzz drowned out Joshua for a time. When my mother held up her picture of Mr. Boone, I realized that if all it took was asking nice in a letter, then, sure, I’d like a signed photograph, too. The cutout in my locker was getting a little ratty by then.
So I wrote to General Hospital. I sent my letter to Joshua Reed’s publicist, not to Joshua himself. Momma told me it would get forwarded to the publicist anyhow, so I’d get faster results that way. Besides, I didn’t want Joshua Reed to think that I was the sort of girl who wrote to stars and expected a response. Publicists, they’re supposed to write back. That’s their job. At least, that’s what I thought it was. I wrote about how I was a big fan, ever since the day Colin Ashcroft first saved Miranda. I wrote about how I’d watched the show consistently, how I had Joshua’s picture in my locker and how I would like to know more about him—where he was from, what he liked, what he was like.
That’s what started it all. It was the second semester of my senior year in high school when I sent the letter. A couple weeks later, a woman called me at home. She said that she did publicity for all of General Hospital, which was a huge job and growing (especially with the Jasper and Helen affair). She said that one of her duties was to organize the official fan clubs for every General Hospital cast member who had one. Of course Joshua Reed had a fan club, but it had been slow to get off the ground—not because he wasn’t popular, but because the woman who then ran it had gotten pregnant and wasn’t getting the newsletter out like she was supposed to. Judy—that was the publicist’s name—said that my letter hit her desk right when she was trying to decide what to do. She asked whether I had any interest in heading up the club, at least as a trial—then before I could answer, she asked how old I was. I said seventeen, almost eighteen at that point, and I could hear her start to backpedal. I could tell she thought I was too young, so real quick I explained how I was a mature seventeen, maybe not in the bra and hips way, but in the way I took care of Beau Ray a lot and did most of the grocery shopping and made sure Momma got presents out for Susan’s kids’ birthdays.
“It doesn’t pay anything,” Judy said. “You’ve got to really want to do it. I’m looking for someone who really wants to do it. I don’t have time to train and retrain and retrain,” she said.
I swore up and down that I wanted to do it, even before I knew for sure that I did. I was old enough to recognize that such an opportunity didn’t often show up in Pinecob.
She told me what I would have to do. I would have to keep the membership list current, forward membership dues and send out a welcome kit. I would have to organize and send out the newsletter four times a year. I would be expected to answer some of the basic fan mail and forward on to her anything that I couldn’t figure out or anything at all threatening. And, Judy said, she would expect me to keep her informed if I heard any rumors about Joshua, good or bad. Did I want to try it, she asked me.
Would I get to meet him, I asked her. Judy said maybe, someday, and surely that could be arranged if I ever found myself in Los Angeles. Judy said that she didn’t know how often J.P. (she called him J.P.) got to West Virginia. But if such a trip ever got planned, she would let me know. Judy seemed really nice—really busy, like one of those New York people you see in the movies talking on two phones at once, but really nice. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and Joshua Reed was twenty-four. I said yes. I mean, what girl wouldn’t have?
I learned right away that you have to be organized. Judy sent me all the information I needed to get started, which included the membership list and copies of his biography and a whole stack of autographed 8x10 photographs. There were only two hundred and seventy-three paying members back then, with a lot in Texas (where Joshua was originally from) and Iowa and Washington state. From West Virginia there were just two—me and Sandy.
Dues were ten dollars a year, and for that, members got (and I had to assemble) a package that included Joshua’s biography and list of credits, an autographed picture, the quarterly newsletter and a membership card—Judy gave me a whole box of blank ones, and it was my job to type in the member’s name. All of that was mailed out in an envelope that had a picture of Joshua (dressed in scrubs, as Colin Ashcroft) printed across the front.
At first, all my supplies fit into a milk crate that Tommy had years back stolen from behind the Winn-Dixie, but once Joshua started getting movie work, I moved into a filing cabinet. I filled it with the clippings that Judy would send to me and the clippings that I came across, and all the normal fan mail. And I kept old photographs whenever a stack of new ones would arrive, in case I needed them some day.
Being president of the fan club made me stand out a bit in Pinecob. It’s not like I was an actress or anything, but people knew that I had connections to General Hospital, and that I could get them 8x10 glossies of just about any soap star, even those on other shows. Once you’re president of a fan club, you learn how those things work. But the fact was—and I knew it—I was still Leanne Gitlin, living at home with Momma and Beau Ray, working at the county clerk’s office over in Charles Town, going out on the weekends with Sandy or whatever guys would occasionally ask, and buying groceries at the Winn-Dixie each Sunday.
Momma was inconsistent when it came to my hobby. On the one hand, she was glad to see me focused on something that wouldn’t get me pregnant. Momma had some professional hopes for me, and I think she realized that my fan club responsibilities provided organizational practice, the sort that you might someday be able to coax into an actual occupation. Much as Momma loved Susan’s kids, Susan had been just sixteen when Kevin came along, eighteen with Kathy, and twenty-one with Kenny. Taking care of three kids when your husband is on the road all day takes skill, but not the sort you can easily turn into a job that pays well.
My oldest brother Tommy had his trade but never seemed to save a dime, and he’d taken to sometimes living out of his truck while he worked different construction jobs up and down the Shenandoah Valley. Vince—well, no one knew where he was, and it was one of those things that even my friends had learned not to mention when Momma was anywhere near. And no one ever talked about Beau Ray getting a job even though he’d had one before his fall. For a while, I’d tried to get Beau Ray to help me with my fan club duties—but even putting things into an envelope was hard for him to focus on, and he’d grow frustrated within five minutes.
But I knew that Momma also worried that the fan club would mess me up somehow, since it was different from what everyone else was doing, and different to her meant abnormal. Somehow she was fine with letting me take care of Beau Ray, and she didn’t mind expecting me to do most of the housecleaning from the time I
