An Open Letter To Chester Cheetah

Dear Chester Cheetah,
(may I call you Chester?)
Dear Chester,

One never knows how to start a letter of admission to love. Especially the kind of love that is so strong, it’s considered to be the catalyst of other loves… obsessions, really, if we’re gonna be so honest. For you are the first redhead I think I’ve ever found attractive and has since set me down a fiery, “Flamin’ Hot” path of ginger-colored crushes.

There would be no Ewan Mcgregor. There would be no Prince Harry. There would be no Michael Fassbender, no Benedict Cumberbatch, no Paul Bettany, no guy-who-plays-Dr. Owen Hunt-on-Grey’s Anatomy, no. If a certain cool cat with a craving for cheese snacks never appeared on my radar (the redheaded Lolita to my Humbert Humbert, if you will) there would be no red hairs on my pillow.*

My strange fascination with that recessive trait in chromosome 16 would not exist if there wasn’t that odd summer day in 1989, after a Saturday morning of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and The Gummi Bear Adventure, you appeared.  Like a vision wearing red swim shorts and your signature wayfarers, you were at a pool. After multiple jumps on the diving board, so cool, so graceful, you spotted your next door neighbor’s open bag of Cheetos Puffs. In true Tex Avery style, you lost your shit. You turned into the animal that you were bred to be (although I’m not sure if cheetahs in the wild are used to eating a diet of cornmeal and lactose-dairy powder), and went after the Cheetos. Like so often in those commercials, you never got what you were chasing after, but your sunglasses stayed in tact the entire time. And your persistence to get the cheese that goes CRUNCH made me believe that there are men… or cats… that would fight for true love.

If only cheese powder came off on my fingers as I run them through your red hair.

And as the world changed, you changed. I don’t know when you became mean, some say evil. I don’t know when you started telling people to put cheetos in other people’s laundry or trash other people’s cubicles. I don’t know when you turned British either. Frankly, you sound like Madonna nowadays. I also don’t know when you became a puppet. But I see the remnants of the cartoon spokesperson that I loved and thought was so cool. I still see the swaggy redhead in white hi-tops that I initially loved.

It may not be easy being cheesy, but it also ain’t easy telling the world that you had the hots for a lactose tolerant feline hocking cheese doodles.

Hugsandkisses,
Jenn

*there aren’t red hairs on my pillow. There aren’t any hairs on my pillow. I’m so lonely.