The more things change (the revenge)
Rejected headline: In which the infidel reminisces about publishing a magazine under the bold cover headline, ‘What if God were one of us?’
Talk about overdosing on nostalgia (again), but I just found an old issue of my college magazine … when yours truly was the editor.
My editorship (then) and my editorship (now) are two different eras. My stories and cutlines were so ballsy and defiant then. Shit, my issue went to bed one week after a proposed merger between Point Park College (a nonsectarian theater/journalism school with a high gay/lesbian/bi population) and Duquesne University (a really good — and really Catholic — school) was announced — so I marched my staff — all of us clad in PPC T-Shirts and sweatshirts, BTW — up to the big marble sign outside of Duquesne and had our staff photo taken outside of it. The cutline reads: “Point St. Duquesne: The infidels of The Pioneer staff wish to pay homage to the Holy Roman Empire.”
I went on to write up an interview with the president of Duquesne for the pompous asshole that he was. I blasted our school trustees for lying to us, claiming to be searching for a president but all the while planning to become an affiliate campus of Duquesne. I got everyone on my staff to submit thoughts/fears/concerns on the proposed alliance and I printed every last one of them in a collage. I profiled the woman in charge of recruiting for my college, and I printed even her off-color remarks and asides, just to show the people who were really in charge of our lives at that time.
And I got away with all of it.
Damn, I had fire.
These days, I tiptoe and whisper and shake my head and run to my office and lick my wounds. The only thing I can do around my office (other than fight the good fight) is to write stories about topics that normally don’t appear in magazines like mine. I take deep breaths and plot strategies to present ideas and information to people who can either make me really happy or make me really mad.
Back then, I could tell people to shove it. I also had people to whom I reported who would back nearly everything I said or did because they truly wanted us to have real-world experience and for us to make a product of which we’d be damn proud — then and in the future. God love Joe Knupsky for letting me alternate between being the fiesty readhead and the fearless fuck-up routine that I’ve perfected over the years.
The sad thing is, Joe is teaching at Duquene these days. 🙂 PPC lost a great spirit in him, and in Mark Vehec as well, who’s doing techie stuff at Duquesne right along with him.
For those interested, PPC and Duquesne parted ways (i.e., no alliance). PPC brought in a new president, and for as long as I had a leading voice in the student media, no one championed her more than I did. She has since turned the school around, doubled enrollment and added majors and departments. I hear PPC might apply for university status in the next year or two, and that’s great. But I will always remember it as the little college that, on one hand, prepared me for the bullshit of non-profit management … but it also nurtured that snarky little rebel in me who just doesn’t have enough opportunities to shine.
I’m going to keep this magazine handy for awhile — to remind me how far I’ve come and how many screaming fits I’ve had with non-editorial people in my day. 🙂 Will I ever be understood again?!?!