Silliness from My Old Life: Letters from Jeffrey Dean Morgan

I think it’s time for some silliness. I’m not sure what made me think of this story, but I did, and I know at least some of you will find it as funny as I do.

Once upon a time, way back in 2007 before Drew and I were married and had Nathaniel, we lived in L.A. and worked together doing market research for the movie industry. My job was to take the data we collected from online trailer and TV commercial surveys, full film screenings, and post-screening focus groups and write reports for the studios to help them figure out the best way to market/edit their movies. It was a very interesting and very stressful job.

Back then I had a major crush on Jeffrey Dean Morgan, stemming from his role as the ever so charming Denny Duquette on Grey’s Anatomy. Then I saw some ads for a new movie that was coming out and I adored him even more, so much that I began to decorate my cubicle with pictures of him.

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I also may or may not have convinced a friend to meet me at a cafe where he’d been spotted having breakfast once. Breakfast isn’t attempted stalking, you know. Whatever.

Anyway…on to Keith. Keith was one of our co-workers. Here is a photograph of him dressed as Optimus Prime at our Halloween office party. Our lovely Kaz is beside him, representing Ratatouille.

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It was a group costume, by the way – summer blockbusters. Claire made a very beautiful Princess Fiona.

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Wade made a very interesting Ugly Betty. He wasn’t part of the group costume, but his was so great I just had to include it.

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I hope my friends don’t kill me after this post. Love you guys!

Okay, back to the story. One day, Keith (aka, Optimus Prime) wrote an email to our group about some kind of issues that were going on with a survey or a program or something. Since my group had a very annoying habit of copying EVERY PERSON IN THE GROUP on EVERY email, we all got it.

My clever boyfriend-turned-husband responded to Keith’s problem with this email. Let me just go ahead and apologize in advance for the following images. We didn’t have graphic software on our computers at the time and the images are not high quality.

The First JDM Message

That was a moment when I loved our “reply all” culture. I’m not sure how this email led us down the rabbit hole to follow, but at some point “Jeffrey Dean Morgan” started emailing our team inspirational messages on a regular basis. He even got his own email address.

Here are a few of my favorites from our crazy collection.

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JDM 11-19
JDMail 11-21-2007
JDMail 11.26.07
JDMail 01-03-2008
JDMail 01-09-2008
JDMail-11.19.10

My JDM obsession was well-known around the office. After I moved back to Seattle, I received this gift from a former co-worker who went to a meeting that included JDM’s manager. Or agent. Or something. One of his “people” was there, anyway, and apparently they were told about my little crush. Awesome. But at least I have this. :)

Thanks, KG

If you want to see the full Letters from Jeffrey Dean Morgan collection, you can check out The JDM Files on Flickr.

If you want to see some of my hilarious former co-workers in action, you can check out their music video that they created to say goodbye to our friend Wade (aka, Ugly Betty). It’s awesome.

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No, this is not my car. Scarily enough, I guess there are other people out there like me.