#alumniissue

by Sara Morrison and Matt Sienkiewicz ‘03

  When looking back on our Amper legacy, one issue sticks out in particular, and it’s one that almost never happened at all. But for our tremendous bravery in the face of adversity, the September 18, 2001,edition of the Argus would have been sans Ampersand. This is our story.

 Sara woke up at 8 a.m. for her freshman physics seminar. She was a junior, but thanks to a typographical error in the course book, managed to register for the course. Barely awake, she arrived at class and listened to a lecture from Professor Shapiro, a charming, effective speaker whose son had recently written a touching memoir about cancer, family, and the benefits of medical marijuana.

 Matt woke up a half hour later, the previous night having been a difficult one. His father, struggling at the time with drug and alcohol addiction, had called with bad news, keeping Matt up late into the night. He looked forward to the brisk walk up Williams Street to his philosophy seminar with Professor Stephen Horst, who was ok.

 Halfway up Matt’s ascent, the world changed. A man, who did not attend Wesleyan but lived in Middletown anyway and thus was not to be trusted, demanded that Matt come into his house.

 “Look at what they did!” he screamed, pointing at the television. Matt had no idea what the man meant, although he thought it was probably racist. Later that day Matt changed his mind, deciding the man probably wasn’t being racist and he ought to give him the benefit of the doubt, giving the circumstance. In 2014, however, it again sounds probably racist.

 As Matt pondered the possibly racist man’s kind -- if oddly timed -- offer of a drink, he watched Flight 175 strike the south building of the World Trade Center. The north building was already billowing smoke.

Sara arrived home after class, unaware that anything had happened -- that the world had changed forever. She went “online” and signed on to AOL Instant Messenger. An NYU student and friend of her boyfriend-- whose “screenname” was “Poopdeck McGee[1],”-- “instant messaged” her. Sara responded by sending him several warning messages, because they had been warning[2] each other as a fun prank for the last several days. But this was not a fun prank.

 “What are you doing???” Poopdeck McGee “IMed.” “The world is ending outside my window right now!”

 “??? >:-(” Sara, or “Cloud9        1,” responded.

“Turn on the news RIGHT NOW,” Poopdeck McGee said, then turned on his “away message."[3]

 And so it was that Sara learned two planes had hit the World Trade Center because Poopdeck McGee told her to turn on the television.

 At this point, Matt had left the retrospectively probably racist man’s house and was watching TV in a friend’s apartment across the hall. Sara joined him.

 They stared in horror as CNN showed innocent men and women jumping out of windows, preferring a swift death by falling over a thousand feet to the searing heat and inevitable asphyxiation that lay within. Some were holding hands. As Matt and Sara wondered how many people were in the towers at the time (the news report said tens of thousands of people worked at the World Trade Center on any given weekday) and how many of them were the parents of their own classmates, the south tower fell. One of the tallest buildings in the world, and it was gone. A half hour later, the scene repeated itself as the north tower followed its sister’s path of tragic destruction. The New York City skyline as Matt and Sara knew it had changed.

 ...

 Five days later, Matt and Sara sat in their High Rise apartment, struggling with the moral dilemma that would define the comedy world of the early 2000s. Late night talk show stages had gone dark. SNL would not be live that Saturday night. Could they, just days after the tragic, world-changing events of 9/11, attempt to write a comedy page?[4]

 “Matt, should we not do an issue of the Ampersand this week?” Sara asked. “Can -- can anything be funny ever again?”

 “Yeah, why wouldn’t we?”

 “Oh sure, ok, you’re right.”

 And so it was that Matt and Sara made the bravest of all decisions: choosing to write, edit and lay out a full page of myopic, Wesleyan-centric attempted humor as the rest of the nation mourned. The NFL cancelled games. Clear Channel banned dozens of songs that might serve as triggers for listeners. Lorne Michaels, Jon Stewart, and Jay Leno sat paralyzed, unsure if America would ever -- could ever -- laugh again. Matt and Sara, however, pressed ahead.

Many heroes emerged out of the tragedy of 9/11: firemen, civilian volunteers, Rudy Giuliani for some still-unclear reason. But did any of these people show the strength, perseverance, or All-American lack of situational awareness that Matt and Sara did?  They did not. Put another way, when you think about it, weren’t Matt and Sara the real first responders? They were.

        [1] Before the advent of Web 2.0, it was common for young people to engage in online communication via pseudonymous avatars. Few people used their actual names, as is the case in contemporary platforms such as Google Chat or Facebook. It was an extremely inefficient and oddly anxiety-inducing system, as one had to pick a permanent name out of an increasingly diminished set of options, none of which were likely to still reflect one’s personality even a few months later. For example, one may have selected in 8th grade the pseudonym through which one was conducting a sort of suspiciously close relationship with one’s boyfriend’s friend at NYU.

 [2] AOL, briefly in 2001, introduced a self-reporting, computerized spam-filtering system through  which anyone could report anyone else for inappropriate content. It would simply count the number of warnings and reduce a user’s ability to send messages in accordance. The result was likely a slight reduction in illicit online behavior and a massive increase in weirdly flirting with your boyfriend’s friend at NYU.

 [3] “Away Messages” were similar to the green, yellow and red status system currently used by GChat. One could and, if one was a college student at a pretentious liberal art school, one was essentially required to post something funny, ironic or cryptic as their away auto-response. A clear and functional statement, such “I am currently unavailable,” suggested one was uninteresting and unworthy of the attention of one’s friend’s girlfriend with whom one was, of course, only being friendly.

 by Jennifer Finney Boylan '80

 We put the Argus to bed about 4 AM, and thenthe editor said, “Chinatown,”  and off we went. A little later I was eating hot and sour soup in New York City.  The editor was happy because he was quitting.  Almost everyone was quitting, leaving me in charge of the paper.  That would have been fine, except for the one hitch which of course was that I didn’t know the first thing about anything. 

I’d come to the Argus late— fall of my senior year, September 1979.  I couldn’t have found an inverted pyramid if I’d been standing on my head in the deserts of Egypt.   I wrote a clever column that autumn though, full of riffs on whatever was going on around campus, packed with sweet little heartbroken jokes.  After a while I tried my hand at news stories, too.  It was harder than it looked. 

In the end I tricked a bunch of my friends, mostly Hermes writers, into working on the Argus with me.  It was a heavy trip, man.  Bluegrass and Irish bands played, more or less at random, in the editors office as we assembled the paper— an endless, physical process in those days before computers.  The managing editor, whom I loved, emitted farts as the result of his all-soy-sauce diet that could knock out a large dog.  We drew with markers all over the walls of the office— which then was on the corner of High Street, across from Alpha Delt.  A guy named John Moynihan used to jump through the windows now and again wearing full pirate gear, pressing a cutlass to our throats and saying, “Arg.” 

In some ways, that experience at the Argus was like my Wesleyan experience in a nutshell.  In addition to my own fledgling scholarship as an English major—which wasn’t much—the main thing I took away from campus was a sense that having an imagination could almost save me in the years ahead.  There were times, as the Irish band played and the air filled with farts and John Moynihan made the Sports editor “walk the plank,” that I thought the world beyond Middletown would be just like this:  that somehow I would, in years to come, be part of a community of creative, sarcastic souls,  that our pizzazz and stink would somehow change the culture and make America itself a slightly less terrible place. 

But of course, there would never be a place exactly like that again, just as there would never be a place like Wesleyan 1980, either.  Whatever piss and vinegar we managed to create was the result of a small group of souls at that time, in that place.  This is probably just as it should be— each generation of Wesleyan students reinvents the place according to its own lights, and anyone who spends her time lamenting the past is probably missing the opportunity to celebrate the future.

Even then it was not unusual to hear people lament that the golden days had passed, that things had been so much cooler in some earlier Wesleyan era.  Usually people who said such things were referring to spring of 1970, when the Grateful Dead had played a free concert on Foss Hill— but I knew a few administrators who clearly felt that the college had peaked in the late fifties and had gone all to hell since then.  Years later, when I returned to campus to teach a course, my students, upon learning that I’d graduated in 1980, lamented that they hadn’t been around when things were really hopping’.  What could I do, except try to remind them that the golden age always lies ahead?   

Now, thirty-five years later, I still often think of those young writers with whom I decamped for Chinatown that night. One of us became a guiding force behind the San Francisco Bay Guardian; another worked for the Wall Street Journal.  A third wrote a bestselling memoir.  John Moynihan joined the merchant marines, sailed around the world, made films, and died young.

As for me, I came out as transgender and somehow, in spite of that complex unveiling, managed to survive. There were a lot of things that contributed to my being able at last to give voice to the things I had long felt in my heart, but one of the most important was having been part of Wesleyan, a place where, on a good day, you could almost believe that creativity, and love, and sheer cussedness itself, could help a person prevail. 

When we got back from Chinatown that morning, I sat down on the front steps of Eclectic with a cup of coffee and watched the campus come to life. Someone was ringing bells in South College. I could not then imagine the world that was to come, but I felt as if something good was coming, that I had, at long last, become part of something larger than myself.

John Moynihan walked past me, wearing his hat with the skull and crossbones.

Dear All,

Welcome to Ampersand’s alumni issue, which also happens to be my last as Editor-In-Chief. Later,fuckers! For this issue, I reached out to many Ampersand alumni/ae (all of whom without exception are devastatingly famous) for content, because I wanted to connect with them on LinkedIn®. Interestingly, and presumably in response to recent events, the memories these editors shared with me were united by a common theme. All were stories about freedom of speech, stories about when it’s okay to make jokes and what it’s okay to make jokes about.

 The fact that this is what people remember about their time with the Ampersand is a beacon of hope for me. The Ampersand exists, first and foremost, to make people laugh. But it also exists, as all comedy does, to deal with difficult subjects, to illuminate another angle of a well-worn debate, and to present a skewed, lovely, and sometimes very dick joke-heavy picture of the world. Are there jokes that are, perhaps, “over the line?” Of course. But I and my faithful Death Eaters maintain that it is our job to make sure that said line remains blurry, that we constantly question its boundaries, that we ask ourselves who erected it in the first place. To our many “h8rz,” I say: To write humor about something is not necessarily to make light of it. In fact, humor in the right hands can carry immense weight.

 Comedy is how we are silly and how we are smart. It is how we reinforce, over and over and over, that these two qualities are not mutually exclusive, that they in fact rely on and enhance each other. I hope that this notion will stay with me as I enter the next chapter of my book (book = life; I’m planning on writing a memoir), and I know that it will thrive forever in these hallowed halls (cubicle with no wifi).

 As this is my goodbye, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge my fans, for keeping me cool on hot summer nights. I’d also like to thank my maternal grandmother and Michael Roth, for being the parents I never had.

 Finally, I’ll shove it down your throats one last time: Comedy is necessary, and it can be important, poignant, and even poetic.

 And with that, beezies, onward and upward.

 Love,