Fellow Portland-Native Anna Kendrick, Will You Go On A Date With Me

Dear Anna Kendrick,
If you read any of my other celebrity ask-out letters you'll notice that they're written in a style that my freshman Comp professor would have described as extravagant (he used this phrase to describe Thoreau's writing, and then gave a mini-lecture about the Latin roots of the word--if I remember correctly extra is derived from externus, which meant "outside" or "outer", and vagant is derived from vaga, which meant "to wander"--and how writing in this style was a way of making form and function match . . . but I digress--extravagantly).

What I'm trying to say, here, Ms Kendrick, is that while asking out other celebrities I may have done a bit of proverbial "beating around the bush," but you're a Maine girl, and I'm a Maine boy, and if there's one thing I know about Maine girls as a Maine boy it's that if there's one thing Maine girls appreciate it's directness (well, that and Bean Boots, Sea Dog's Blue Paw blueberry wheat beer, and Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury)*.  So with you I'm just going to be direct:


Anna Kendrick (or AK-47, as I would imagine you've been called by friends since you were about 11), you wanna go on a date with me?  If you want to go to a Portland institution we could do the Great Lost Bear; if you want to hit somewhere new(ish) near your old Deering High School stomping grounds we could go to Siano's Brick Oven Pizza (the original Deering Center one, obviously--my younger sister works there and it's way better than both of their newer locations); and if you want to go to an absolute dive we could hit Bubba's Sulky Lounge or Old Port Tavern Billiards (I recommend the latter--we're less likely to get knifed there).  So whaddaya say--I think we both would have had better times than we actually had at our respective proms (Deering '03 and Waynflete '04) if we had just gone with each other instead of whoever we went with (I'm gonna guess you went with a baseball player--Ryan Flaherty, maybe?), but while we can't change the past, as Gramps taught Brother Bear in The Bearenstain Bears and the Trouble at School, it's never too late to correct a mistake, so it's past time for us to start making up for lost time.

So, that was me--several em dashes nested within parentheses, three full paragraphs, and thirty-five minutes of writing after starting on my celebrity ask-out letter to you--being direct.  I'll be expecting your call (or, rather, email or Twitter, since I don't have a phone number anywhere on this blog) any minute now.

Sincerely,
A Dude You Should Date


*So what it seems like I'm really saying here is that I don't know anything about Maine girls (or likely any sort of girls).  And also that I love convoluted sentence structures (that's not so much explicitly stated as it is implied).