Fran Lebowitz has been called "the funniest woman in America"--and also "America's most legendarily blocked writer." Her sardonic essays from the late 1970s, now collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Vintage, 1994), reflect her view of writing as "a rarefied form of a tantrum." In the following paragraph from the essay "Taking a Letter" (which first appeared in Metropolitan Life, 1978), Lebowitz offers a fresh (and ironic) perspective on the postal workers in her neighborhood.
The Greenwich Village Postal System
by Fran Lebowitz
My neighborhood is located in Greenwich Village, a quarter of the city well known for its interesting artistic qualities. These qualities are to be found not only in its atmosphere and residents but also in its public servants. There is, in fact, not a single local postal employee who does not possess a temperament of such lush moodiness that one assumes that only an unfortunate lack of rhythm has kept them from careers devoted to the composition of tragic opera. Exhaustive research soon established that this was no accident but a carefully planned effort to bring the post office closer to those it serves. The Greenwich Village Postal System is a separate entity dedicated to the proposition that nowhere on earth are men created more equal than downtown on the West Side. Thus its offices exhibit a clean Bauhaus influence. The wanted posters refer to desires more personal than federal. Uniforms are chosen on the basis of cut and fabric. And they have punched up the official motto with the Greenwich Village Addendum so that it reads as follows: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can stay these couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds. However, offended sensibility, painful memory, postman's block, and previous engagements may stay the courier for an indefinite period of time. C'est la vie."
"Taking a Letter" was first published in Metropolitan Life, by Fran Lebowitz (Dutton, 1978), and reprinted in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Vintage, 1994).
