What: I collaborated on a fanzine with Michelle Tea.
Where: Boston.
When: 1989-1990.
Why: Michelle and I were teenagers, still living with our fams, both working not-quite-hip minimum-wage jobs on Newbury Street in Boston. We'd each scored interviews with our favorite bands at the time—I'd lugged a boombox to chat it up with Chicago proto-grunge band The Jesus Lizard on their first tour, and Michelle had a typewritten transcription of her interview with pioneer goth rockers Christian Death. That was all each of us had, so we decided to pool our interviews and put out a zine.
What happened: Despite our collective teenage fervor, two interviews isn't quite enough to warrant a zine. Some friend of Michelle's had contributed some stupid four-panel comic about a guy getting run over by a lawnmower, but that was it. Eventually Michelle and I drifted apart and the zine never happened.
Legacy: Michelle Tea went on to co-found the Sister Spit spoken word tour and has authored and/or edited over a dozen books, two of which (The Chelsea Whistle and The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America) are largely about our circle of friends who hung out in Copley Square in the late 1980s. Her work is a milestone for a generation of writers and readers interested in feminism, queer culture, sex work and memoir. Meanwhile I went on to write about Bollywood music for a couple of magazines and put out a handful of highly obscure publications under the name Cardboard Capers before contributing a chapter to the anthology Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority.
Michelle and I reconnected in 2004 and she's invited me to read at the underground writers series that she hosts at the San Francisco Public Library. Check back to see if this actually happens—or if it becomes another episode in the Almost Archive.
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