Mark Your Calendar: PostSecret at Bedford Gallery

I don't normally post on much stuff "through the Tunnel" (sorry, Contra Costa folks -- just can't go there), but this is too good to miss: The international phenomenon PostSecret has come to Walnut Creek's Bedford Gallery.

"In November 2004, Frank Warren handed out 3,000 postcards to strangers. He invited people to write down a secret anonymously and mail it to him. Each secret had to be true and something that had never been shared with another person.

Word of the project spread, people began crafting their own homemade postcards, and the artful secrets began arriving from every continent. Today, Warren has received more than 250,000 postcards. Every Sunday, [he] posts secrets on PostSecret.com, which has been viewed more than 220 million times.

The PostSecret exhibition features more than 400 postcards that bring together the most powerful, poignant, and beautifully intimate secrets Warren has received. Warren has tapped into the universal stuff of being human, the collective, often unconscious level of existence that defies age, culture, gender, and economics.

Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Carefully and creatively constructed by hand, [they] are made from cardboard, old photographs, wedding invitations, and other personal items [that] have traveled to Warren from all over the world."

Warren will be signing copies of his bestselling books A Lifetime of Secrets, My Secret, PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives, and The Secret Lives of Men and Women during the exhibit's opening reception, 8 to 9 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, March 4. The show will be up through April 19.

Bedford Gallery is located at 1601 Civic Dr. in Walnut Creek.

Learn more about the PostSecret project here.