Anna Paquin and other stars use fan-mail / fan club service.

Fascinating inside look at fan -mail

In the course of her career as a psychotherapist, Shelley De Angelus counseled schizophrenics, patients with multiple personality disorder, and garden-variety neurotics.

Long exposure to people with inflated expectations, economy-size fantasies and delusions of grandeur serves her well in her current slot as the office manager of Mail Mann, Inc., a Los Angeles-based fan-mail and fan-club service. Daily, she or her colleague Marie Kehoe stops at the post office to pick up white plastic bins of letters addressed to such clients as Anna Paquin, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Gere, Reese Witherspoon, Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, Joe Cocker and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as some cast members of the series “Two and a Half Men,” “30 Rock” and “Brothers & Sisters.”

They’ve got mail, thousands of missives a week — from fans who want to express approval/disapproval of their idols’ political stands, religious beliefs, recent headline-making behavior, taste in mates or taste in movie roles. From fans who want to express sympathy or support when there’s been a death in the celeb’s family. From straitened fans seeking cash (five- and six-figure requests are not uncommon) and from fans seeking a far more precious commodity: a date for the high-school prom.

Read on

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/where-fan-mail-goes-to-get-answered/