Dear Owner:

After noticing a number of mentions for your web page on the Wiseguy newsgroup, I looked in on Renaissance. I must say my expectations were completely fulfilled. I expected a con job and that is exactly what I got.

Everything about Renaissance is fraudulent -- the smarmy, self-congratulatory tone, the phony guest book entries and the dauntless troll warning. It is offensive in the way that racism is offensive, because it is the product of an uneducated mind.

Among the most disturbing symptoms of your ignorance are your fan fiction short stories, which apparently feature Roger Lococco, a character from the Mel Profitt and Lynchboro episodes of Wiseguy. The Lococco in your fiction is difficult to recognize as the character on the television show. He is utterly humorless -- a foul-mouthed mad dog drowning in a sea of angst!

You've got Lococco all wrong, dear, and you've got Vinnie Terranova wrong as well. You depict Vinnie as the supporting, sensible neighbor of countless television sitcoms. You are possibly a fan of Wiseguy, but you lack insight into these characters, therefore you are unable to communicate them properly on the page. You haven't really listened to the dialogue or read between the lines of the scripts. You need a better product if you are ever going to justify charging readers for your work (as rainemaker so cleverly suggests). Is it possible that you have willfully misread these characters because you actually dislike them?

It is impossible for me to read all your stories -- I simply cannot bear to read any further than Exodus, Near the Beginning and Sunday in NYC -- but I do hope you haven't mangled Frank McPike the way you have mangled Frank and Vinnie.

Your fiction puts me in mind of cheap paperbacks! It is as if you have plagiarized a bunch of bad romance novels, substituting Roger Lococco for the Fabio hunk on the cover! I am truly embarrassed for this extraordinary fictional character, that his facetiousness, intelligence and elemental complexity should be so reduced to the self-indulgent thug of your turgid tales.

Further, your heroine is a whining, clinging, useless dead weight -- not a very progressive image for a woman of the 1990s. Your prose makes Jackie Collins look like Maya Angelou, and your plots are well beneath the comprehension of pre-schoolers. You aren't able to write a true love scene, so you use the average Adult video as reference. How sad.

Let me give you some advice. If you put genuine effort into your fiction instead of using your web page as a weapon, there is a distant possibility you may become the "aspiring writer" you describe yourself as, rather than the rank amateur your fiction presently condemns you to be. It will be hard work, and you will have to finish high school.

Oh, and by the way, dear. There is something else you have all wrong.

Miki Bailey is not a Certified Bitch. Micki Bailey is a Certified Coward.

And one more thing, Micki, or Marie, or Sadie, or Iggy, or Reese, or rainemaker, or whomever you are...

It's called a straightjacket. Get one.

Best wishes,

Dean Moriarty

And now my response......

Subject: Re: Renaissance
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 18:49:11 -0400
From: Micki Bailey (mlbailey@bellsouth.net)
Organization: Renaissance
To: Dean Moriarty (beatbook@excite.com)
References: 1

Dear Dean Moriarty:

Thank you so much for your highly entertaining comments concerning my personal web site. I've read them twice now and gotten a huge laugh both times. I do appreciate you visiting Renaissance's facilities and increasing my hit count.

My impression is that you might need to find more productive ways to spend your time. It sounds as if you've wasted valuable minutes (even hours) of your life hatefully exploring my site and then even more time writing me that attempt-at-scathing e-mail. Does it actually mean *that* much to you? And if so, why?

To quote Don Johnson from William Russ's "Nash Bridges" episode, "You sound a little emotional there," Dean. How exciting for me that my site (and my short stories especially) have apparently riled you up so much! I love stirring people's emotions like that!

Do you have some kind of personal vendetta against me or against Renaissance? Why bother with such bitterness? Why spend so much time on this site if you found it so distasteful?

Sure, I love feedback, as I claim on my Literary Lounge page. But you've gone WAY out of your way to express your displeasure. And then boldly suggest (at least I think that's what you were doing) that *I* need a straightjacket? Hmmm.......

Something doesn't smell right here........Smells coincidentally like retaliation for some horrible wrong I must have committed.......Sounds like the outcries of the most intelligent of the Trolls, the babbling, brainwashing one........But I digress.

As I said, I'm getting a big kick out of your scornful, detailed analysis and hysterical accusations. At least I've moved you in some way.

Btw, not that I feel the need to explain, I'll tell you anyway that the stories were all written for entertainment purposes only. Not to be taken so seriously and critiqued by a haughty, intolerant person such as yourself. I'm not in college looking for a grade, for Christ's sake! Lighten up! (tee hee)

And they are, let me remind you, MY stories. I can adjust the known television personas as I wish. You, I presume, are not being forced to read them. You can, I trust, put them out of your furious psyche if they upset you as much as you described.

And you are, I might add for the record, the only negative reviewer I've encountered thus far. And your negative review bordered on "ranting, rambling attack."

But hey! *Someone* must like them. That page has hundreds of more hits than other William Russ fiction pages that I am aware of. Hmmm........

I'm giving serious consideration to posting your entire message (name and address included) to the Wiseguy newsgroup. They don't have anything else to read right now, and your little diatribe involves their favorite show and characters very heavily. I'm sure they'd find it interesting that someone like you lurks in their midst.

Besides, I've already been accused by the foulest of the Trolls of "destroying" the newsgroup already. What more harm could I do now? This response from me will, of course, be the "Part II" of the posting.

This message has taken my "uneducated mind" approximately 12 minutes to write to you. Let me thank you again for wasting tons more time than that on my site and feeling moved enough to open up all of your hostile emotions in an e-mail message to me. Perhaps you should try Prozac if this trivial little stuff gets to you that much.

I hope you've gotten it all out of your system. If not, stop on by Renaissance again! Sometimes I can't distinguish the Trolls from the fully-evolved, walking-upright, speaking-actual-words persons.

Micki
The Owner of Renaissance