Ches

Note: This letter of recommendation was written at the bequest of the below- and above-mentioned Francesca, who said, “Max, would you write me a letter of recommendation?” Whether or not she had a humorous public photo-essay style letter in mind is beyond me.

I have, in the past, written letters of recommendation for many of my friends. I wrote Mara’s letter for Brown, Lishu’s for Minerva, and Vitoria’s for COA, among others. It is only because Ches is already in college that I elected this more humorous, public medium for her letter. Enjoy.

To Whom it May Concern,

There is little as instantly detestable as a person lacking in vices or imperfections. Francesca is just that: she is kinder, wiser, more likable, and better looking than myself. In sum: she is the devil incarnate. If it were not for my superior record of academic accomplishment I would be hard pressed to speak to her at all, so potent would she prove as a reminder of my manifold imperfections. But that’s not to say that Ches is a dumb blond; nay, Francesca can read books of the greatest complexity and respond with analysis of cutting wit and profound insight. (She just has such bad taste in books that this seldom happens.)

Francesca speaks perfect Spanish and perfect, if less flowery than my own, English. Her accents in both are generic and palatable. She cuts her nails with surgical precision and chooses her friends with the deliberation of an art curator permanently borrowing sacred artifacts from a developing country. She likes fresh-squeezed orange juice and pulp fiction (the pseudo-literary genre, not the film) and making jokes about sad things. Where others are rendered neurasthenic by the vagaries of life, she rebounds, finding humor and fun and love in dark times, sleazy places, and imperfect people. She is complex and brilliant and her eyebrows are distracting but when you get past that you can see that she is just a very frustratingly good, enjoyable human being.

Francesca and I attended high school together, where we were surrounded by an international ensemble of eccentric pseudo-hippies with artistic sensibilities overlapping with Andres Serrano. Francesca handled our unique peers with aplomb, excusing herself to the privacy of her home when she’d had just about enough, but generally finding good fun in the diversity and machinations of her wild companions. She still maintains close bonds with a wide variety of our classmates, friends and otherwise, and follows their lives and gossip keenly.

Francesca is good fun. She is caring, but in a Marc Maron rather than Dalai Lama sense. She is magnanimous and funny (and mean when one should be mean) and judicious with her social power. It is through a concoction of luck and romance with her roommate that I am now bonafide friends with the idiosyncratic Francesca, a woman who just two years ago I knew so poorly I believed her name to be Franjessica. The power of yam fries and unread books sent mail-service-priority over oceans once barely circumscribed by desperate murderer pirates in order to establish my resident country of the U.S. of A. will forever cement our mutual bonds of affection. And if not, if Francesca decides someday she is no longer friends with Max von Hippel, then all of the above assertions are immediately made void and defunct and untrue, and the precise opposite will be the case, and Francesca will be a terrible person not worth the photons discharged to light up the pixels visualizing this document on my 15” retina MacBook Pro, and one could stop reading this document after the following full-stop: .

I highly recommend Francesca for whatever one might recommend a Francesca for. She is the humor of O. Henry bundled with the generosity of Cicero; the wild fun of Bulgakov meshed with the thoughtful wisdom of Voltaire. Francesca is a ride-or-die 1-in-100,000 bad mofo. Francesca Nugent is all that and more; all that and a bag of chips!

With love and affection,

And with a healthy disdain for her taste in literature and movies,

Max von Hippel