Dear Heather Locklear

This Washington Post piece about people who write President Obama brought me back to the days when I used to scour the pages of BOP and Tiger Beat for celebrities' addresses.

The article notes Obama reads 10 personal letters a day. He responds to a few of those.

For the lucky ones who get responses, the envelope is generally met with a mix of shock and elation.

After all, even for the writer, the decision to write a celebrity is often regarded as an exercise in futility.

That didn't prevent me from spending a good chunk of my preteen years drafting letters to stars. I had my regular rotation: Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Rider Strong and Ben Savage. I also regularly wrote to the cast of "Troop Beverly Hills" and my favorite "Melrose Place" star, Heather Locklear.

In the letters, almost always written with some sort of scented gel pen, I'd tout my city's virtues -- you know, just in case any of the stars were ever in the neighborhood. Also, I always gave my phone number. Probably not the wisest move in retrospect.

I wrote the letters under the assumption they'd be handed directly to the recipient, not left unsent and hidden by my dad in an office desk drawer. (Yes, that really happened.)

It was a little naive and pathetic, but I'd return to those days.

There's something kind of reassuring about explaining rejection not by a glaring character flaw, but simply a glitch in the mail.