Dear Ricky Schroeder,
I cannot call you Rick Schroeder. I just can't. You will always be Ricky Schroeder to me. But this is a mea culpa, after all, so I'll just add this to the list of the many things for which I owe you a long overdue apology.
Ricky, here's the thing. You have been living your life blissfully unaware of the harm that I meant to cause you 29 years ago, when I was just a wee girl of 7.
My sister and I were regular viewers of your smash sit-com, Silver Spoons, and while we were routinely wowed by the acting chops and dramatic prowess of your small screen costars, Joel Higgins, Erin Gray, Franklyn Seales, and Alfonso Ribeiro, we just didn't have the same enthusiasm for you. We just didn't buy you as Ricky Stratten. Something seemed forced, inauthentic. Whenever you rode that train into the set's living room, we knew we were supposed to be amazed, but we just never felt that you fully embraced the character's lust for life. If you couldn't feel it, how could you make us, the viewers, feel it?
At the time, we were amateur critics. We blamed you and you alone for your shortcomings. We never realized that the directors and casting personnel had set you up for failure. How could any young actor hold a candle to the riveting portrayal of Dexter by the illustrious Franklyn Seales? But again, we were too young and too wet behind the ears as television viewers to see the big picture. We just thought you sucked becasue, well, you couldn't act to save your life. When I look back at reruns of the show in syndication now, I realize that you were doing the best you were. Seales was just a natural scene stealer, and he robbed your thunder at every turn. That wasn't your fault.
So I apologize to you for judging your performance unnecessarily and unfairly harshly. You were just a child.
I hope you can accept my apologies for the vicious and heartless insults we hurled from our lazy-boy recliners. We were so smug with our Kool Aid and Doritos, lobbing insults and subjecting your performance to our harsh scrutiny.
Ricky, I wish I could end my apology here. As shocking and hurtful as this revelation must be to you, I'm afraid I have to admit that there's more. I might as well warn you that what I'm about to tell you is even worse. You might need to brace yourself.
One day, when my sister and I were pondering the most recent installation of the series, we found ourselves feeling a particularly strong dissatisfaction with the quality of your acting. You had entered adolescence, and the creators of the show didn't really seem to know what to do with you. Should they make you the cute little boy that had captured the hearts of Americans? Should they turn you into a cheeky but affable pre-teen?
The lack of clear direction for your character was off-putting enough to cause us to take to our Hello Kitty notebooks and interchangeable-tip pencils. I'm ashamed to say that our intention was not to offer you constructive professional critique, or to show our support for you in this ambiguous stage of your career. Ricky, our intentions were purely cruel and mean. At the age of 7, I penned perhaps the most vicious missive of my entire life. I am 36 now, and I have composed quite a few more poison pen letters in the intervening 29 years, but none have been quite as hurtful and vengeful as the one that I authored on that fateful day in my attic bedroom, my sister keeping watch for our mother and monitoring the content of the letter.
I do not remember all the specifics of the letter. I think my memory and subconscious have suppressed the majority of the details of the letter. But the one line that has seared itself into my brain as the hallmark of the cruelty that I meant to inflict is this one:
"Ricky Schroeder, why don't you take your half-bakaed shit and shove it up your ass?"
Yes, Ricky, it's true. I wrote this all by myself as a seven year-old second grader.
As you well know, there was no internet in those days. I could not simply take to the world wide web to shoot off the hateful missive on a whim. And I could not simply look up your address online.
I had no problem at the tender age of 7 composing a hate letter with a level of verbal dexterity that would make an Obama speech writer jealous; my biggest challenge was trying to figure out a way to get the letter to you.
So, I tucked the letter into a book and put the book under my bed.
I suppose a few things came up in my busy second grade life, because the letter was quickly forgotten. Needless to say, we never got around to mailing it.
One day, my mother, on one of her infamous cleaning jags, found the letter under my bed.
As you can imagine, my mother, who at this point was in her mid-thirties and working full time to raise her children, was not able to indulge herself in the weekly pleasure of watching Silver Spoons. She therefore had no idea who you were. Having mistaken you for a poor defenseless classmate of mine, she flew into an angry tirade. She demanded to know who I was bullying, and for what poor hapless soul I could possibly harbor such hatred.
I frantically explained that I was directing my 7 year-old venom toward a television celebrity, and not a member of my second grade class. She wasn't buying it. She eventually called my Aunt Julie, her sister, to confirm.
Oddly enough, Ricky, once she found out that I was directing my rage and viciousness at a small screen starlet, she was less perturbed than when she thought I had penned the letter for a classmate. She was, however, still irate about the aforementioned line from the letter.
My mother is still quick, to this day, to tell anybody who'll listen, about how my first grade teacher was so awed by my advanced reading skills that she awarded me her first "A" in reading to any first grader of her entire career. The teacher told my mother that in her experience, emerging readers always have room to improve, but that I had torn through her entire library like a cyclone. My mother will go on to talk about how grade two standardized tests revealed that I had the reading level of a 12th grader. Doubtless she had visions of her nobel-prize-in-literature daughter dancing in her head, when the realization that I would be more likely to serve jail time for the federal offense of mail harassment came crashing down on her.
Ricky, I never did get to mail you the letter. If memory serves, I got a rather stiff punishment, and was relegated to my room and deprived of television privileges. Clearly, I deserved that and much more. Having been confined to my room for days on end, I'm sure I missed an episode or two of Silver Spoons. Oddly enough, missing the show made me realize that you were more important to me than I thought. I grew to appreciate you during that lonely period of solitary confinement.
Why, after all these years, am I coming clean to you when you'd be none the wiser without my true confession? I don't know. I can't say for sure. I guess that with your recent birthday, and with your turning 40, it seemed time that we all grow up. You're calling yourself "Rick" after all. I guess it's time I grew up, too. So, in the spirit of turning over new leaves and looking to a brighter future, I have to lay it all out on the table.
Ricky, I hope you can forgive me.
With much love,
Nancy
