It took 10 years for someone to send this theater critic flowers to his office—our version of backstage.
It took 10 years for someone to send this theater critic flowers to his office—our version of backstage. bk

All journalists get weird mail.

I happen to get a lot of letters from inmates (years of writing about drugs and prisons will do that your mailbox), some paranoid-sounding (and some not-so-paranoid-sounding) letters about surveillance and conspiracies, poems and paeans to various bars and cultural institutions old Seattleites have loved, the occasional tip (some of them hilarious, like one sent without a return address or signature that began "can this be off the record of it's anonymous?" Answer: yes, by definition), and so on.

But in my nearly 10 years as a critic, nobody's ever sent me flowers—and I never thought anyone would send me flowers for a theater review I wrote a year and a half ago. A close-up of the note from my mysterious well-wisher is below the jump.

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bk

So who is Jennifer? Elizabeth Heffron wrote the play, and Paul Budraitis directed it. Hannah Mootz starred in the solo show, and Jen Zeyl designed the set—but I can't imagine she sent them. I've written much nicer things about her over the years (and much more recent things).

It's a riddle, but a good kind of riddle reporters aren't often left with: Who's the culprit behind this act of gratuitous kindness?