I recall having two pen pals when I was a child. One was someone I had met. He lived in Nevada or Arizona or some such desert state. The week or so that I knew him was spent playing the occasional chess game. I was around 11, maybe. Me and my parents lived in Cerritos and he was visiting someone in the neighborhood. He went back to his desert town, but we would write. Once, he very enthusiastically wrote about how he was going to be on the JERRY LEWIS TELETHON. His caps, not mine. This was a fundraiser for muscular dystrophy or angina or something. I didn’t particularly care for Jerry Lewis or his telethon (although I liked the Jerry Lewis movies “The Nutty Professor” and “Cinderfella” when I was 6…much to my parents’ dismay, which I now understand). Well, I had tickets to a wrestling match, so I wrote him back and said that I would be going to THE OLYMPIC AUDITORIUM. My caps. I never heard from him again.

The second pen pal was someone who wrote to me when I posted a photo of myself in the pen pal section of a wrestling magazine. I was about 10, I think. I’m not sure if that would even be legal now. A kid from Canada wrote to me. I wrote back and told him how close I lived to the Olympic Auditorium. No caps there. Never heard from him again, either.

Now the Olympic Auditorium is a Korean church.