Transcript: You Must Answer the Questions About Feet

Rob Long salutes the vital 'middler' role of agents

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

An actress friend of mine once got a lovely letter from a fan — she had been on a show we worked on a few times; she wasn't the star; she was seven out of 13, a recurring guest — but someone, some guy, took the time to write her a warm note.“I just love your work,” he told her. And he mentioned some of his favorite lines from the show that she said, and he mentioned some of her previous work.  

“It would be an honor,” he wrote to her, “if you'd let me put up a web fan page. Please help me by answering the following questions. What's your favorite color? What's your favorite type of music? What kind of shoes do you like best? What kind of movies do you like? Favorite sport? What's your shoe size? Where were you born? How often do you get a pedicure? Do you have a favorite city? Are both of your feet exactly the same, or is each one magnificently unique? Favorite food? How steep is the slope from your ankle to your arch? What was the last book you read that really touched you? Does your little toe curl under the one right next to it? Have you named your toes? Do you come from a big family? Please answer as many of these questions as you can.  

“But you must answer the questions about the feet.”

What I admire about the guy who wrote that letter is that he went to the trouble to sort of kind of try to — or at least look like he was trying — to deflect attention away from what he really wanted — which was, I hope at most, just to touch my friend’s feet not, you know, to take them home with him — and so he added in a lot of other questions that we all know he didn’t care at all about, but at the end he wanted to make sure he had been heard.

“You must answer the questions about the feet.”