Mr. Larratt,

Hi. My name is D**** M**** and I'm a student here in Montreal. The first time I saw BME was in about september, I was just surfing the net one day after school and came across your site. The first page I saw was one of the free EXTREME pages. Even though the pics were really small and limited I was blown away by what these people were doing. I remember one time seeing a "Ricki Lake" show that had a bunch of "freaks" as guests and thinking how cool it would be to look like them. One of them had a pretty small earlobe stretching, probably about a 0ga, I couldnt believe that there were people outside of African tribes that had done this sort of ritual. I was deffinetly hooked from that point. Just after that show I got my first ear piercing. It was just a regular gun piercing but man was I stoked. About a year later I got a second piercing on the same ear, then another. My parents sort of put a stop to my piercing right there but at the the time I wasn't really thinking of anything more extreme. About 2 years past and I took out all 3 ear rings. I was tired of them. I guess my parents were right, it was just a "phase". When I saw BME I realized that it wasn't just a phase and that I would really like to get into the piercing/tattooing scene. Living in Montreal I have pretty good access to the piercing and tattooing communitee here so it wasn't hard to get into the scene. I started going on BME and reading everything I could about every piercing I could. I read them all and looked at all the pics I could. I had a couple of experiences about subincisions and lobe stretching hanging around my room and when my dad found them he wasn't happy. He couldn't understand how people could do these things to themselves. I tried to explain but he just can't understand.

Oh Well!!! I am into it and I really don't care what other people think about me. About 2 months ago I decided to start stretching my earlobe. I started with trying to stick a kilt needle throught the hole. This worked but I couldn't leave a giant safety pin through my ear so I took it out and deciced to get it done professionaly. The first stretching session I did was from 16ga to an 8ga. I bought a nice clear acrylic plug and left that in for about three weeks. The next time I went in I had him stretch me to a 4ga, again buying an acrylic plug, this time a red one. I had that one in until about half a week ago. I was just looking around in my brothers room and I found a nice GI-Joe missile which was a good size and had a nice taper on it. I cleaned it up, cut it down and made a nice yellow plastic plug out of it which I guess is about a 2ga. My parents aren't that happy about my ear because they are very worried about me not being able to find a job becasue of it. I understand why they are worried but my ear isnt too big and I doubt that it would affect anything. Since I'm only 16 and I have a lot of time to do other modifications. I'm not really pushing my parents or just going out and doing whatever modification I feel like at the time. I have been talking to them and they know and understand how I feel about the whole body mod scene and life and they are considering allowing me to get a labret stud, on the condition I can get a job and that it wouldn't interfere with that job. I'm just happy they're even considering it. I would really like to get into the industry as a piercer but I'm not sure you go about doing that. I guess I'm writing this letter to thank you for opening up my life to all the forms of body mod and giving me access to all the great pics and experiences.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks
D**** M****