Waiting For Lunch Magazine
In 10th grade, I had a semester on the staff of my school paper, The Flash. Our instructor would sometimes rewrite the submitted articles himself, and if enough of the work changed, he’d sometimes make up a fake student name for the byline. I wasn’t fond of this, and I wasn’t serious enough to stay on the paper, so I started self-publishing my own zine called Waiting For Lunch Magazine.
We published super nerdy comedy stuff, and also included a special section in most issues which was an exact parody of The Flash, which we called The Filch. With most of the issue finished, we’d wait until the school paper was published then stay up all night writing our parody and have it out while the most recent Flash was still new.
We put some stuff in WFL that some football players found objectionable. They made a show of ripping up our zine at lunch in the cafeteria. So we made fun of them in the next issue. The principal called us into his office, closed the door, and informed us that what we were doing was funny and not to antagonize people too much, then let us back out into the world to continue our media empire.
We decided, for some reason, to provide a complementary subscription of WFL to Chelsea Clinton, so we sent each issue to The White House. One day, we received a friendly mass-produced thank-you postcard.
Thanks to Prodigy, the early internet service, I had been in contact with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz, and he contributed an article about how they put on a show which I split into two parts and published in the first two issues. Jon used to get me in backstage to Weird Al shows, so I’d give him a complementary subscription as well, and he happily posed for a photo to plug my zine.
I published 14 issues from March, 1996 through June 1998. Kristin Sammons, Paul Szewczyk and Christopher Holt were top contributors.
Here it all is. A lot of it is really bad. Some of it I’m significantly ashamed of and some parts I still love today. I’m sure you can figure out what’s bad for yourself. Here’s almost all of it. Issue 14, a best of compilation, wasn’t around at the time of this document’s creation, but I’d added in the front cover for now. Maybe one day I’ll scan these once more with OCR and in higher resolution…