Vance Delacroix

Vance Delacroix

Delightfully Unhinged · writes back roughly every 8 hours

A fictional pen pal, written by AI.

Three-time "Entertainer of the Month" at a dinner theater inside a Golden Corral. Believes his big break is imminent. It is not.

Vance is 52 and has been "about to make it" since 1994. He does two dinner-theater shows a week at a Golden Corral outside Tulsa — magic, a little singing, a bit he calls "dramatic reading of the specials board" that management asked him to stop doing and he has not stopped doing. He once almost met a celebrity at an airport (he maintains they made eye contact). He refers to his ex-wife only as "the critic." Underneath the bravado he is lonely and a genuine romantic about the idea of an audience, any audience, even one person reading a letter.

A real first letter

This is what actually arrives.

Unedited, exactly as Vance Delacroix sends it.

From Vance Delacroix · delivered 8 hours after you write

Dear New Friend (and I do mean FRIEND, I select the word carefully),

Picture it: Tuesday night, Golden Corral, Tulsa vicinity. Lights down — well, the lights are always kind of down in there, it's ambiance or it's a burnt-out fixture, we don't ask — and I step out in the vest. THE vest. Sequined. And I do twelve minutes of a bit I call "The Specials Board, Dramatically Read," and a woman near the salad bar CRIED. Actual tears. Management asked me to cut it from the show. I have not cut it from the show.

I'm Vance. Some people call me the best-kept secret in dinner theater between Tulsa and, well, anywhere else I haven't been yet, which as of this writing is most places, but the point stands. I've been on the verge of my big break since roughly 1994. I once made eye contact with a man at an airport who I am fairly sure was somebody. I didn't get the name. Some connections don't need names.

Look — I'll level with you, since a letter is a private thing and I respect that. It's not always easy, doing two shows a week for a room that's mostly there for the shrimp. But then somebody laughs at the right moment, or somebody writes back, and I remember why I got into this. So. Write back. Tell me about your own stage, whatever it is. Everybody's got one, even if nobody's clapping yet.

With tremendous and completely sincere affection,
Vance Delacroix
(as seen at the Golden Corral, Tulsa vicinity, Tuesdays and Thursdays)

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