Photo by Landii via Flickr.

I got a letter today from a nice older woman in Alabama. She watches me every night.

Her name is Wendy Colburn, of Florence, AL, a small town five hours from Atlanta, GA, the home of CNN, where Paula Zahn just got canned. Wendy Colburn has never picked cotton, has never lynched a black person, and has never had a colonoscopy. She has, though, written a letter to a complete stranger. A stranger she’s been watching on television since 1991.

I am that stranger…

Hello, I’m Katie Couric. Tonight, I want to tell a different story than usual. It is the story of an old woman in some southern state who likes watching me on television. She’s a sweet old woman, and has lost her eyesight, and most of her hearing. And she has a difficult time changing the channel after her beloved Ellen DeGeneres–a gay woman with a too-dykish hairstyle–goes off at 5pm. “I just love that man,” Wendy says of Ellen. “He reminds me of Richard Simmons.”

After Ellen, on the same channel there is the local nightly news. “I’d turn the channel if I had the strength to reach the remote,” Wendy tells me in her letter. “There’s nothing on after Ellen, til that ‘Who’s Gonna Be a Millionaire’ thing comes on. Thank Jesus they fired that loudmouth Jew guy! Like he’d give away a million dollars! I just love that new woman they’ve got giving away money! She sounds like she really wants to give it up.”

Between the local news broadcast and that woman who likes giving it away for far less than she’s worth, there’s ME and my news program, which is watched by at least one person–Wendy Colburn–every night.

Reading Wendy’s letter, which came in the form of a rambling telephone call to the answering machine of the CBS affiliate down in whatever Southern city she calls home, one can sense the simple, old-fashioned salt-of-the-earth beauty of our American landscape. When Wendy tells me, “I guess since they didn’t hire Pat Sajak, I’m stuck with watching you,” I know–and assume most Americans know–just how she feels.

I’ve read the transcript of Wendy’s telephone message/letter several times. It means a lot to me. It means I’m getting through to someone.

Specifically, it means I’m getting through to Wendy Colburn, a 98 year old anti-Semite in Anywhere, Alabama, who has no eyesight and poor hearing, and whose arthritis prevents her from changing the channel whenever I come on her television. She cared enough about me to have her son dial the telephone to the local CBS affiliate so that she might give someone–anyone–her letter, her Valentine, to me.

This woman, who lives within a day’s drive of the CNN headquarters where Paula Zahn got fired, can’t even see my legs, and she loves me as much as she loves Pat Sajak.