Email of the week

We waited until the 11th hour to declare a winner of this week's competition, but our patience was rewarded as two wonderfully weird letters arrived this afternoon.

The first, unfortunately, was disqualified because it was an accidental forward from a reader who had previously written me on a TV matter last January. Her email program remembered my address from that transaction, and today, somehow, it was added to the recipient list of a rather unpleasant memo on matters of some circumstance (all I remember seeing before I deleted it were the words "attorneys" and "CYA"). I'm always amazed how this stuff happens. Every now and then Gmail will insist on forwarding a message to Newsday's Diane Werts instead of Mrs. TV Barn. So far, nothing involving lawyers or my "A" have gone to the wrong Diane.

But the winning entry comes from this reader responding to my article about FX's "Damages":

In your article in the Sunday paper—Oct. 21—“When Good Shows Get Bad Ratings”—you repeated an anti-feminist mistake that I thought went out in the 1960’s.  Specifically (and for the second time in an article about “Damages”), you called the Glenn Close character by her first name all through the article and the Ted Danson character by his last name.  You do call one of the male characters David, but in both articles you call the lead character Patty and the Danson character Frobisher.  You call another female lead by her first name also—Ellen.  There is even a list where you repeat this grossly unequal pattern:  “Ellen, Patty and Frobisher.”   Why not just call him Art and keep the first name pattern throughout?

Are you going to start calling the women “girls,” next?

I wrote the reader back, offering to sell her a copy of my wife's book, which I published, about the pioneering feminist Kansan Clarina Nichols. And then I asked her if she actually watched "Damages." If so, she would've known that Ted Danson's character is referred to, usually, by his Don Martin-esque surname, while Patty is Patty and Ellen is Ellen and Ray is Ray (though I didn't refer to him by name).

Below, in case you don't believe me, from the official FX web site:

It's funny that the reader is measuring my political correctness — a real-world metric — by how I refer to fictional TV characters, who occupy a realm that psychologists often describe as "fantasy."  But the most amusing detail of the letter is that she has been counting my references to "Damages" characters in multiple columns. She's keeping score! Now I know what it's like to be Maureen Dowd.

And for the record, I call them "gals."