LizLetters

Hot Topic

Elizabeth McLaughlin, Hot Topic CEO
18305 E. San Jose Ave.
City of Industry, CA 91748

Dear Ms. McLaughlin:

    I am writing to congratulate you on being one of the top companies on the list of those having women in a significant number of executive positions. This honor is mentioned in a piece about the “Study of California Women Business Leaders,” put out by my alma mater, UC Davis. It must really burn, however, to find yourself in the number two position, with 41.7% of your executives being female, while the top ranking company has 50%. I think your goal for 2006 should be to acquire the number one spot!
    If it would help, I would welcome the opportunity to be an executive in your company. I have no experience in that sort of position as of this writing, and I would have to work from home or bring my daughter to the office, but we could work around these technicalities. I suppose I would have to move to Southern California as well. My daughter is also available for employment, although she is not yet two and thus could work solely as a model, which would not affect your statistics.
    Well, with or without my assistance, make ‘06 the year of the woman!
    Rock on.

Truly,

Liz Mann

Oh Canada

Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa
K1A 0A2

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

    I understand you recently had a productive meeting in Cancun with our President Bush and Mexico’s Vicente Fox. You are fairly new to your post but I’m sure you are aware of the challenges Mr. Bush has with the English language (although he did try out a little French!).
    Bush mentioned that you are going to need to work on “vital relations.” I am fairly certain that he meant to say that you need to work on “vittle relations.” The glaringly unbalanced ratio of Mexican restaurants to Canadian restaurants in the United States has many Americans scratching their heads.
    I have great affection for Canada, and so I am willing to help you if I can. I have an idea. There is a very popular Mexican restaurant near my home that has patio seating out front. If I could organize a decent group of people, we could bring some Canadian food and sit and enjoy it at the tables in protest of the lack of Canadian restaurants in the area. If there’s enough media coverage, that could be enough to raise public awareness and get someone to finally do something about this issue.
    In order to implement this plan I will need some Canadian food recipes. Do you have any recommendations?
    I was happy to see on your web site that you send out letters and certificates for Canadians’ significant birthdays and anniversaries. When I turn sixty-five, if I’m not yet a Canadian, I’ll contact our President and see if she’ll send me a card.

Truly,

Liz Mann

India's Girls

Rajam Krishnan, Associate Professor
Primary Care Medicine
University Malaya
50603 Kuala Lumpur

Dear Professor Krishnan:

    BBC news has run several stories around the issue of female infanticide in India. You are mentioned as being one of the first people to write about this subject and bring it to the world’s attention.
    I think that in many Americans’ minds, there is an awareness that in many places, particularly in Asian countries, female children are unwanted and frequently abandoned. We generally do not explore the issue beyond recognizing that many Americans adopt girls from orphanages overseas. Also, we are woefully unable to properly address our own problems with the subjects of abortion and women’s issues.
    I find it horrifying that fetuses are aborted simply for being female, and that newborns are killed for the same reason. My initial reaction is to wonder what sort of monster could kill her own child. After reading more about the circumstances of these mothers’ lives, I see that the situation is much more complex than I would have imagined, with pressure from family and society, and consequences if they do not “obey.”
    Thank you for the work you do to improve women’s and girls’ lives in India.

Truly,

Liz Mann

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be Republicans

Professor Jack Block
UC Berkeley Psychology Department
Room 3210, Tolman Hall  #1650
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1650

Dear Professor Block,

    I read about your study today, in which you observed that adults who are conservatives often were rigid and fearful as preschoolers and liberals were resilient and self reliant.  I immediately wondered, though, about the preschoolers’ parents in your study, and whether it is more common for children to adopt their parents’ political leanings or to rebel against them. I can't help but think of a couple of my grade school playmates who seemed like clones of their Republican parents. In my experience this seems more common than the rebellion, and when rebellion does happen it seems to be most frequently against conservative parents. But I am merely an armchair psychologist and therefore can throw around these gross generalizations.
    When I was pregnant and reading about child development, I formed a few theories about the sorts of traumas warmongers such as President Bush must have experienced as infants to make them turn out as they have. Has anyone looked into whether we are in Iraq because Bush was not breast-fed?
    My child is not yet in preschool and I am grappling with the inevitable next dilemma: what can I do now do reduce the odds that she grows up to be Republican? Any ideas?
    Thanks for your time and for your contributions to our understanding of the mysterious human mind.

Truly,

Liz Mann
Berkeley class of 1997

IKEA

Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA Founder
c/o Inter IKEA Systems B.V.
Olof Palmestraat 1
NL-2616 LN Delft
The Netherlands

Dear Mr. Kamprad:

    As I write this your eightieth birthday is three days away. By the time you receive this letter you will be enjoying fond memories of celebratory festivities. Based on an article I just read about you, the bash will probably be modest, with a homemade cake and a few friends. I will raise a toast to you on Thursday. I owe you that much, as wherever I happen to be sitting in my apartment I am always on an IKEA chair. In fact, a good eighty percent of my furniture is from your store, plus some housewares and a fabulous crawl-through tunnel for my little one.
    I am happy to read on your site that you maintain a vision of “social and environmental responsibility.” In so many areas of life one needs to be rich to “do right” by our planet. Organic food and goods are prohibitively expensive for many people, as are items that are made without sweatshop labor.  It’s nice to see that you are setting a good example in your business practices and in your lifestyle.
    There is a story in today’s news about a student in Iowa who stayed at a Wal-Mart during spring break. He spent three days there without leaving at all! If I were to take on such an endeavor, I would do so at IKEA. Sometimes after shopping there I feel as though I have.
    Happy birthday! If you are ever in California you can crash on my Ektorp sofa bed.

Truly,

Liz Mann

Macaulay Culkin

Macaulay Culkin
c/o William Morris Agency
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Culkin,

    I’ve seen a few pieces about you in the news lately, particularly surrounding your new book. Stories that reference your Q&A with Time Magazine suggest that you are having an existential crisis about your place in the world. This is certainly not a feeling that’s exclusive to former child actors, of course. But what especially struck me was a quote in which you say “I don’t know what people want from me.” Perhaps this is true for most celebrities, but the circumstances in your life may have led you to feel that you need to be what people want you to be. Resist! From reading your chat with David Amsden of New York Magazine it seems that you are beginning to do just that.
    I thoroughly enjoyed your performance in “Saved,” and when I saw the film I thought, “this is great, he let some time pass and now he can do what he wants to do.” If I thought you were trying to please anyone but yourself I would be disappointed.

Truly,

Liz Mann

Cheney Dangerfield

Vice President Dick Cheney
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. Cheney:

    Finally, the ruckus has died down after the late night television hosts got the jokes about your shooting incident out of their systems. Now it seems as though you are ready to go on the comedy circuit yourself! I saw a bit of your speech where you claim that if the Democrats are competent you should be singing on “American Idol” (your Rodney Dangerfield shoulder shrugs added a nice jokey flair).
    All you need now is a prop. Your first impulse might tell you a cigar would be a good choice. Let me advise you against that one. Most of your quail-shooting Republican cronies would probably think it was a gas, but the general public is beginning to sour on tobacco use. You could have a hand-held microphone in your pocket and burst into song at odd moments, but it’s “been done” by Ashcroft.
    Maybe a prop is not the best thing for your act after all. Physical humor always gets a crowd going. Every once in a while you ought to stumble and clutch your chest. When the Secret Service guys descend upon you, just say “Gotcha!”. Easy as pie. The best thing will be that the Democrats will just be sitting there staring. Your humor will go right over their heads. That’s how we win wars!

Truly,

Liz Mann

The Scarlet License Plate

Assemblyman Ray Haynes
Assemblyman District 66
State Capitol
Room 4158
Sacramento, CA 94249-0066

Dear Mr. Haynes,

    I do not live in your district, but I was compelled to write to you after reading a piece in today’s paper about your proposed bill AB 2099, which would require those with multiple drunk driving convictions to swap their license plates for special red “DUI” plates for two years. I fully support this idea and hope it passes. I wonder what percentage of the cars on the road would end up having these plates. It would be a wake-up call for us all to see them as we drive along. In thinking about the possible ramifications of this bill becoming law, I wondered whether people might be discriminated against. It’s one thing for folks on the road to have proper warning that they’re driving near a repeat offender, but one might suffer additional consequences such as being fired from their job after pulling into their reserved space at work with a shiny new red plate. After considering this I thought: “Well, these people are making a choice when they drink and drive. Severe, if unexpected, consequences are bound to find them or the unfortunate soul they are likely to injure or kill.”
    As I perused your web page I was surprised to see that there are other issues on which I certainly do not agree with you. You wish to legally define marriage as being between a man and a woman. I feel that any person should be free to marry any other person, whether a man or a woman. It seems very peculiar to me that you present an annual “Nosey Award” for “legislation that tells others what to do” and intrudes “into our business and lives.” Why is it not “nosey” to regulate whom one can or cannot marry?
    Despite our ideological differences, I wish you luck in your efforts to get AB 2099 passed.

Truly,

Liz Mann

The Boob Tube in the Queue

Virginia Cargill
SignStorey
183 Sherman Street
Fairfield, CT 06824

Dear Ms. Cargill:

    I was not aware of your company until the recent news story about your affiliation with CBS. Like thousands (millions?) of others, however, I have been exposed to your product, the television screens that are sprouting up in major supermarkets. I was in Albertsons, which I generally avoid because it feels like walking into a city made of bags of cat litter and bottles of strangely-colored juice. Hovering above they conveyor belt at the check-out line there was a small screen showing various snippets of talking heads. I haven’t had a television in my home for quite a while now, so I was keenly aware of the zone-out that I fell into looking at the screen. It was a little frightening.
    Your press release describes your product as providing companies access to "an increasingly difficult-to-reach target audience, in an environment where they are open to receiving information.” Because of my above mentioned aversion to large supermarkets, I am not sure I am your target audience, but I can tell you that I am difficult-to-reach on purpose! The only information I want to be receiving is the nutritional content of what I am purchasing, its price, and possibly which celebrity has a previously unknown love child who is now operating an international underage counterfeit alien cloning ring.
    To this you might argue that the magazines at the checkout are equally visually invasive. I would not agree. The sound that accompanies the televised images makes it more difficult to ignore. Perhaps I am too resistant to change, but some of the elements that make an otherwise dull supermarket trip interesting are eavesdropping on the banter between the clerk and the woman in line ahead of you, and the awkward moment when you are absently perusing what the person behind you has in his cart and he tries to hide a case of Ding Dongs under a head of cabbage.
    Too many people are plugged in and zoned out in their own homes. I think we should get a break and have a chance to look around when we’re out in the world.

Truly,

Liz Mann

Men Exorcising

Steve Vaught
P.O. Box 301793
Escondido, CA 92030

Dear Steve,

    I just learned of yor walk across America. As you mention on your web site, so did a few other people, and now we’re bombarding your site! I browsed some of your recent journal entries, and I applaud your candor and frankness. You may not have anticipated when you started out that all of the personal details of your life would be “public access,” but I am certain that your willingness to be so open is helping countless people.
    My husband recently began a similar project on a smaller scale. He is walking around the San Francisco Bay on the Bay Trail with our toddler on his back. She’s been a much better sport about it than I ever expected. He is not trying to lose weight, but has set a few personal goals for himself that he hopes to accomplish this year. Other items on the list include climbing Mount Shasta and Mount Whitney, bike riding around the Bay in a day, and swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco.
    The article I saw about your walk mentioned that you have been having trouble finding healthy food along the way. I hope the publicity about your adventure helps raise awareness about Americans’ poor eating habits. We’ve got to create the demand for availability of better food.
    Good luck on this journey and beyond!

Truly,

Liz Mann