It’s not easy being the smartest person in the room and I say that with utmost humility. And that’s all I have to say about that. See? Me smart.
The rain falls down on this humdrum town, this town has dragged you down. I am so trying not to write about the place where I work. So I’ll write about Pink Bunnies and Lollipops.
Pink Bunnies and Lollipops was the name of the second publication of OIC. OIC was a magazine that my friends and I tried putting together in the 1980’s. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Rand and I were the principals of the magazine, with input from various friends and supporters.
Nights spent red eyed from lack of sleep and as well as cannabis. Two friends, Steve Saporito and Charlie Charas interviewed Mark E. Smith from the Fall. Martha Keavney interviewed her alter ego Bill Wynant in Dunkin Donuts in Hoboken. There were poems, photos, and art. Fun stuff.
Rand and I flew to San Francisco to try to sell it there. For some reason we thought it would catch on, on the west coast. We wandered around various bookstores and discovered a lack of interest. We went to the Anarchist bookstore and found them to have too many rules to follow in order for them to even consider us.
I suppose we were like National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, Cat Fancy and a definite precursor to Sassy. We had an open door policy, meaning that we would publish anyone that submitted anything.
The first issue was glossy. Geri Fallo, new to Hoboken then was working for a printer in Bergen County and assured us she could print it all for free after a print job for the Village Voice. We’d simply use whatever was available after the Voice was done with it.
The idea of free printing appealed to us. Geri snuck a notice that we would publish most anything in the back page of the Voice. Surprisingly, very few people submitted anything.
Then Geri gave us the bill. Turns out Geri’s idea of ‘free’ was not the same as our idea of ‘free’. We balked. She had them in the trunk of her car. We argued. We got the issues and Geri eventually became the Culture Czar of Hoboken some years later.
We decided to make our next issue, ‘Pink Bunnies and Lollipops’, a Xerox issue. Geri and her promises were out of the picture. Someone had access to a copier. Not just any copier, a color copier.
Martha Keavney, Lois DiLivio, Jane Scarpantoni and a whole host of others contributed. It didn’t sell, because we just gave them away. More art, a surrealist parlor game called ‘the Exquisite Corpse’, and poetry.
That was followed by ‘Mommy, May I?’ The cover featured Ronald Reagan asking Mommy Nancy is he could push the button. We lost steam and ambition and readers, if we had any to begin with.
It was a fun time for most everyone concerned. I suppose this blog is a continuation of that. Some pictures, some jokes, some ranting. Not enough clip art, no poetry.
Sort of an intelligent design, no?