Mean Season Read Free

official fan clubs for every General Hospital cast member who had one. Of course Joshua Reed had a fan club, but it had been slow to get off the ground—not because he wasn’t popular, but because the woman who then ran it had gotten pregnant and wasn’t getting the newsletter out like she was supposed to. Judy—that was the publicist’s name—said that my letter hit her desk right when she was trying to decide what to do. She asked whether I had any interest in heading up the club, at least as a trial—then before I could answer, she asked how old I was. I said seventeen, almost eighteen at that point, and I could hear her start to backpedal. I could tell she thought I was too young, so real quick I explained how I was a mature seventeen, maybe not in the bra and hips way, but in the way I took care of Beau Ray a lot and did most of the grocery shopping and made sure Momma got presents out for Susan’s kids’ birthdays.
    â€œIt doesn’t pay anything,” Judy said. “You’ve got to really want to do it. I’m looking for someone who really wants to do it. I don’t have time to train and retrain and retrain,” she said.
    I swore up and down that I wanted to do it, even before I knew for sure that I did. I was old enough to recognize that such an opportunity didn’t often show up in Pinecob.
    She told me what I would have to do. I would have to keep the membership list current, forward membership dues and send out a welcome kit. I would have to organize and send out the newsletter four times a year. I would be expected to answer some of the basic fan mail and forward on to her anything that I couldn’t figure out or anything at all threatening. And, Judy said, she would expect me to keep her informed if I heard any rumors about Joshua, good or bad. Did I want to try it, she asked me.
    Would I get to meet him, I asked her. Judy said maybe, someday, and surely that could be arranged if I ever found myself in Los Angeles. Judy said that she didn’t know how often J.P. (she called him J.P.) got to West Virginia. But if such a trip ever got planned, she would let me know. Judy seemed really nice—really busy, like one of those New York people you see in the movies talking on two phones at once, but really nice. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and Joshua Reed was twenty-four. I said yes. I mean, what girl wouldn’t have?
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    I learned right away that you have to be organized. Judy sent me all the information I needed to get started, which included the membership list and copies of his biography and a whole stack of autographed 8x10 photographs. There were only two hundred and seventy-three paying members back then, with a lot in Texas (where Joshua was originally from) and Iowa and Washington state. From West Virginia there were just two—me and Sandy.
    Dues were ten dollars a year, and for that, members got (and I had to assemble) a package that included Joshua’s biography and list of credits, an autographed picture, the quarterly newsletter and a membership card—Judy gave me a whole box of blank ones, and it was my job to type in themember’s name. All of that was mailed out in an envelope that had a picture of Joshua (dressed in scrubs, as Colin Ashcroft) printed across the front.
    At first, all my supplies fit into a milk crate that Tommy had years back stolen from behind the Winn-Dixie, but once Joshua started getting movie work, I moved into a filing cabinet. I filled it with the clippings that Judy would send to me and the clippings that I came across, and all the normal fan mail. And I kept old photographs whenever a stack of new ones would arrive, in case I needed them some day.
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    Being president of the fan club made me stand out a bit in Pinecob. It’s not like I was an actress or anything, but people knew that I had connections to General Hospital, and that I could get them 8x10 glossies of just about any soap