Throwback Thursday: 1990

"OH DEAR GOD. Never Google yourself." 

That's what I wrote under "Write a Review" on an archive site I discovered this week. On this site, someone had posted the Spring 1990 issue of our college Honors newsletter, a quarterly called Femmes d'esprit. Spring '90 was the second issue after I became the Editor. The previous editor, Stacy, had gone off to Europe on a semester abroad. While I was envious of all the girls who got to do things like that, I was thrilled to take over. And today I'm equally thrilled and mortified that this PDF has been raised from the tar pits of time.

Thrillified

😻Thrilled because Spring 1990 was the first issue of Femmes d'esprit that was desktop published. Prior to that, our Honors Program newsletter had been cut & pasted in the original sense of the term like old zines had been made, and were still being made in those days. The Mac lab was still new to the campus in those days. Not many girls wandered in there, but that is where I created the first template for the new Femmes d'esprit.

🙈 Mortified because I hate reading things I've written. I hate it. So much so that I've even toyed with the idea of joining Mortified in order to get over it. I will, as soon as I can think about it without feeling like I have to throw up.

Mortified

😻Thrilled when I recall Dr. Raia's reaction when she saw the desktop published issue. She widened her eyes and said, "Are you kidding me." My heart soars still when I think of that. I loved Dr. Raia. I loved her mind, I loved her shoes. What a dame.

🙈 Mortified because of the finger-waggy, super bitchy note I put on this issue's front page chastising the 64 girls in the Program for lack of participation. What a twunt I was! Someone should have punched me in the face.

What is this "zine" that you speak of? 

Muy Bueno was a zine by Aaron Tap.
This is #6 in 1996, from my personal collection.

Do you know what I mean when I say that zines were "cut & pasted" by 1990s terms? You'd type, using a typewriter, or write in longhand if you had a decent hand. Then you'd cut the text from the paper with scissors, and use paste to glue the bits of text to a new sheet of paper. Before the final paste, you'd arrange all your items in a nice-looking layout. Add pictures and cartoons, draw, add your titles and write in your page numbers. Then you'd take your pages to a copy place and make photo copies of each page, however many you wanted to "publish." You'd staple the pages together and give your zine to your friends, or mail it out if you had such grand distro ambition. T Max was doing The Noise that way, and there were a lot of cool subculture zines happening. Pagan Kennedy wrote a great book about zines. It was the zine makers that started blogging, by the way. Zines were the first blogs, easily 30 years before "blog" was a thing.

1990: Femmes d'esprit Goes Digital

#NeverGoogleYourself

I loved how cool the first desktop published issue made the Honors group look, and shouldn't we be leaders? You see, the college had just gotten a new computer lab with a bunch of Macs. In those days, this was a big deal. Not one person had her own computer at school. Typewritten papers were the norm, but papers written in longhand were still accepted...that's how old I am...

Anyway, the semester when I became Femmes d'esprit Editor in Sophomore year, I did one issue the old way, but I decided that the next layout would be done in the Mac lab, not at the Honors Program office conference table using scissors and glue. Age of the geek, baby!

The college had installed Adobe Framemaker, which no one had even heard of in those days. I didn't even know how to use Framemaker, not even a little bit, but I went in there anyway and I did my best converting Femmes d'Esprit to digital. Yeah, I had no idea what I was doing. You can see that I couldn't figure out how to format the page numbers, for example, so those were literally pasted on, the old way. So was the issue date on top right, and it's even a little crooked. Oh man. (I got better at Framemaker eventually.)

Dear whoever posted this on The Internet Archive...

I see that you also posted a lot of other CNR-related PDFs. Here's why you gave me a smile today.

It never dawned on me before, but it looks like the Honors Program kept publishing Femmes d'esprit using my template, on the Macs in the lab. I picked that font, and I love that it kept going for awhile.

CNR Class of '92 20th Reunion
L to R: Audra, me, Lisa, Jen, Lorraine
with Larry the Bartender
who didn't remember us
at all.

You see, the College of New Rochelle kicked me out the following year, along with anyone else who didn't have enough money to pay for class registration in advance. I'd had this system going where I'd work my ass off all semester to pay down the tuition that wasn't covered by scholarship or grant money, but suddenly, they wanted full payment in advance. I couldn't do it, and no amount of tearful appeals helped. I had to go home. Lots of us did.

I was devastated. In retrospect, that was my first bout with depression, though I didn't recognize it at the time. Neither did Jen, who thinks about it now and just remembers that she couldn't get me out of bed to go to class all of a sudden. At our 20 year reunion, which technically I "crashed" because I never finished my last six credits, Audra said, "Do you guys remember when they changed the rules and all those girls had to go home?"

"Yes, I remember," I said.

So I never thought about the Honors Program newsletter again. I mean, it makes sense that they wouldn't have gone back to scissors and glue, but it just never occurred to me to wonder what happened after they kicked me out.

This was a hoot to find and read, really, thanks. Makes me smile. Check in if you like, maybe I know you?

md∎

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Left: The Noise is a New England-area rock zine launched in the 80s.
Right: Pagan Kennedy is a recognized authority on the zine scene.