To: Ellen (hopefully noticed by her or Andy)
From: Anna Lee Murphy
Address: 25709 US Highway 431, 35747 Grant, AL
Date: 7-12-13, 4:23 AM (Central Time)
Subject: URGENT: Ellen, I need your help: SOS
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Dear Ellen, (or Andy)
Hi there. I really hope you're reading this.
Um, I really don't know how to start this. I mean, how are you supposed to start a letter to someone you look up to and watch on television everyday? They don't exactly have handbooks for that kind of thing,
Everyone has always told me it was impossible for youth ever notice me, and that the only people that you helped were those of us who had nothing and had done good all their lives. "Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future." -Oscar Wilde
I feel like I'm going about this all wrong.
Let me try this again? This is going to be long so you have to stick with me.
Okay, so hi again, Ellen! My name is Anna Lee Murphy and I was born December 17, 1997. If you don't want to do the math I'm 15 years young, 16 in December. I live in North Alabama in a tiny house in a tiny town called Guntersville, east of Huntsville, home of the Space and Rocket Centre. I live with my family of 2 sisters, 2 brothers, my mother, Audrey, and my stepfather, Tim. I'm the eldest of thee five children, Jillian the youngest at 6, my sister, Caitlin, the second oldest, at 14 (it still feels like she's 12 most days), Brody is the second youngest, at 7 and Jp (short for John Patrick) is 11. We're all a bunch of characters.
We just got cable again for the first time in 3 years and the first thing I did was watch your show. It was so funny because the cable guy was the testing the channels and my sister and I only have like... 15 channels and 2 of them has no audio and one of them is in Spanish. Unfortunately, we don't speak Spanish. But he turned right on your show, just as the episode was starting, and I freaked. I hate television but I was so happy I was going to be able to watch your show on a regular basis.
Anyway, once again, that's beside the point.
Ellen, I need your help.
I feel so stupid asking for anything from you, because the odds are against you even reading this. But I HAVE to try. There isn't really anyone else i could turn to for this kind of thing.
So here's the story, no alterations or sugar coatings.
When I was younger we had everything we could have ever wanted. My dad had worked hard to ensure that, that would happen. But, after a few years, a few siblings later, the economy went downhill, my father made some bad decisions and ended up paying for them, resulting in my mother having to try to raise five kids on her own and us missing out on time with our father for a little over four years. During that time my mother and father divorced which resulted in my mother meeting Tim which resulted in my mother getting remarried. Tim is a great guy, but he never had any children so you've got to give him credit for taking on five.
Times are hard for everyone and I guess our family is no different. We struggle from paycheck to paycheck and whenever it comes to the end of the month were always having to figure out what's going to have to be sacrificed that week in order to make it to NEXT month. That's just the way things go with a family of five kids living on one man's salary.
I was recently accepted to a private arts school in Michigan called Interlochen Arts Academy. I'm an artist. Surprise! Its the biggest, most important part of me, it's what makes me, me. I never really believed it was possible to pursue art as a career because art wasn't something you could make a living off of. So I just stuck to drawing for the sake of getting things off my chest that I didn't want to talk about and I spent most of my free time just doing that: drawing. We moved around quite a lot and i never stayed in a school longer than a year so it was hard for me to make the lifelong friends that everyone else seemed to have, so drawing was a real close confident for me. I mostly drew anime, which is Japanese cartoon characters, and I was really into the cosplaying scene, which is where you dress up in costumes so that you look like real life anime characters. Yet after a couple of years cosplaying got too expensive and I sort of mastered that type of art so I didn't have anything to challenge myself with anymore. Out of nowhere, early July, almost exactly 2 years ago now, my grandmother asked me to "Try doing realistic artwork, ya know, draw real people?" And I guess that sparked something in me because for the last two years, that's what I've been pushing myself to do, these realistic portraits. But it's a lot more than that for me. I practice, teach myself, EVERY, SINGLE, DAY. My mother said that I pushed myself so hard I've developed carpultunel in my wrist. Which is technically true.
