StupidGuy's tale of WOVO woe with the interchangeable sisters reminded me of a vaguely similar episode in my misty past. It only involved letters, though, not a trip. Back in 1997, I sent out about 100 letters to various ladies that caught my fancy in the catalogs. This was before the internet really took off, mind you; we old-timey FSUW seekers back in the '90s often used actual printed catalogs and snail mail. Fax was considered pretty high-tech. That newfangled email wasn't widely available in FSU yet. And we walked to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways. But I digress.
Anyway, there was this one girl in Chelyabinsk named Nelly with whom I exchanged maybe three letters. Keep in mind the round-trip communication time was about a month. She was a pretty, zaftig bottle-blonde girl that sent me photos of herself lounging about in a terry bathrobe. Gave really good letter, but I quickly became fixated on my future wife Natasha so she fell to the wayside.
Well, I got engaged and was waiting at home waiting for my fiancee to arrive. (K-1 took about 6 months.) On my engagement I'd sent a letter to all the ladies who had ever written to me (about 50) letting them know I was engaged and returning any photos they might have sent me. I figured it was the polite thing to do so they're not left hanging. Probably two dozen of the ladies sent very nice notes in reply congratulating me. I realize such social niceties may seem a little quaint in our brave new era of email/SMS/Twitter/whatever.
I also got such a letter from Chelyabinsk, but it wasn't from Nelly. It was from her friend Larisa. Apparently, Nelly had close to zero English skills, while her friend Larisa was quite fluent. So naturally, Larisa had been the one writing the actual letters, she claimed with only minimal input from Nelly. It seemed Larisa was impressed with my follow-through and wanted to throw her hat in the ring just in case things didn't work out with Natasha (I recall this was very diplomatically phrased; I wish I still had the letter.) She'd liked me all along, she confessed, but Nelly had dibs and Larisa hadn't wanted to backstab her friend. Now that I'd cut Nelly loose, though, she'd decided to try her luck; nothing ventured, nothing gained after all. Larisa affirmed that Nelly was a very nice girl but went on to confide that she thought Nelly a bit too ready to marry any man who asked. I gathered that Larisa was writing an awful lot of correspondence for Nelly and it was becoming a bit tiresome.
Well, I found this quite flattering and Larisa herself (or at least her letter) quite charming, so I wrote her back a nice letter making clear that I was confident of my engagement but that I'd try to find a nice man for her. I did in fact refer a few men to her, but to my knowledge nothing ever came of it.
-- Kevin
