My Long-Distance Dedication to The Donor Who Keeps Ignoring Me

If you’re ever looking for me on a Sunday night, I’m sitting in the parking lot of an ice cream place waiting to pick up Child #2 from her shift. This is me:

I’m doing two things in this picture:

1. Wondering which customer will try to order a milkshake right before closing just to be told by my daughter “we’re out of milk” because she doesn’t want to clean the machine again. Don’t believe me? Try it. It’s your ice cream funeral, friend.

2. Listening to a local radio station playing an old episode of Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” countdown from 1987.

For the unwashed who don’t know Casey Kasem, he was a longtime radio DJ and host of a national countdown show. His memorable sign-off was "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

Two pictures of Casey Kasem. Google tells me he was the voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo from 1969 to 1997.

I tune in to old episodes of “American Top 40” because (1) it’s on, so why not? and (2) you learn that the 1980s were absolutely held hostage by songs like El DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night.”

My favorite part of the show is always the “Long-Distance Dedication.”

After powering through the dregs of the bottom half of the countdown (I’m looking at backbenchers like you Til’ Tuesday and Modern English), Casey would read letters submitted by listeners.

They’re amazing.

Actually, they’re awful.

But Casey’s performance when reading these letters is amazing. Below is a representative situation you might hear from an episode in 1987 on a Sunday night in 2025 waiting to pick your daughter up from work:

Bethany—a homely teen living in the suburbs of Duluth—writes to Casey about how hard it is to fit in at school because she has freckles (or something). She’s become pen-pals with a repentant, middle-aged inmate at Leavenworth prison named Marco. His letters, we learn, have helped Bethany understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She’s now head-over-heels in love with Marco but is too shy to tell him. So she asks Casey to dedicate Wham’s “Careless Whisper” to him on national radio, hopes he hears it in his prison cell, and promises to wait for him.

Casey reads the letter with everything he’s got. Deliberately. Evenly. Slowly. Sincerely. His voice drops a register.

And in the process transforms the entire letter into a total ham sandwich. He chews it up, swallows it, and then momma-birds it directly into our ear holes. Masterful.

Pure performance art.

Jinkies! Zoinks! Animated evidence of how a Long-Distance Dedication should be performed and consumed.

I wrote my own Long-Distance Dedication last Sunday night. It’s to the would-be donor who won’t call me back. I doubt it’ll make it onto “American Top 40”—the show’s been off the air since 1995 and Casey Kasem’s been dead since 2014—but you never know!

Here goes…

Dear Casey,

I’m a fundraiser who enjoys the simple things in life: Raising money for a good cause and raising a daughter who likes to disappoint customers at her summer job. Recently, I met a prospective donor and we hit it off! He gave me his card and said “Reach out anytime.”

So I did. A few emails. A voicemail.

Sadly, he never called me back.

I was confused and upset. You hear about these things happening to other fundraisers, but you never think it’ll happen to you.

But here’s what I’ve learned from it. Sometimes, “reach out anytime” really means “Please don’t reach out anytime.” It’s taught me that the power of fundraising was inside me the entire time.

My Long-Distance Dedication goes out to the donor that wasn’t meant to be. I want him to know that I appreciate meeting him and learning about his philanthropy. And I hope he’s happy and healthy. But I also hope he’s not calling other fundraisers back either. If I can’t have his donation I don’t want anybody else to. Haha. LOL. JK.

Has anybody spoken to you yet, Casey, about making a planned gift? No? Let’s talk!

I’d like to dedicate Was (Not Was)’s “Walk the Dinosaur” to the donor who got away. The song has absolutely nothing to do with this situation, but it’s a crowd pleaser. It’s also dedicated to Bethany and Marco with the message, “Dan really, really hopes things never worked out for you two.”

Thanks, Casey. I’ll keep my feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. Even though that sounds like a recipe for stretching myself too thin and chasing donors I shouldn’t chase.

Let’s hear it, Substack! What Top 40 songs are you trying to get the ghost of Casey Kasem (RIP) to dedicate to your donors?