And like any other bimbo secretary, most of the stuff I had to do was
pretty tedious. My main duties were answering phones, sorting mail, and performing random administrative tasks
for the rest of the editorial staff. But I was also assigned the
responsibility of editing my own section--a collection of readers'
true-life embarrassing stories-called "Blush!" Every month, I'd receive
literally hundreds of submissions. My job was to go through all of them,
choose the best and funniest letters, and edit them for the
magazine.
At first, I got a huge kick out of reading submissions to "Blush!" The most popular stories involved waste fluids coming out at an inopportune time and place. In most of them, the girl would be in the middle of class, or on a date when, to her surprise, she'd have her period, or fart, or get diarrhea, or accidentally pee--almost always in front of the guy whom she happened to have a huge crush on at the time. But after a few weeks, this stuff didn't seem as funny. There are only so many variations on embarrassing teen girl stories. It became obvious that instead of making the extra effort to come up with their own unique anecdotes, girls would read what was already printed in the magazine and think, "Oh that happened to me, too. I'll write it up and send it in!" All the submissions began to blend into one another. I had a box filled with a thousand of these letters, and I still couldn't find anything new to fill up my section. |
How embarrassing! Well, in
my version of the story, the girl hides behind the shower curtain and
watches the unsuspecting dad do his business. He discovers her and
after flying into a mad rage, throws the girl out of the house. My bosses
loved this stuff. Neither they nor the audience of over 200,000 teenage
girls had any idea that half the entries in "Blush!" were written by some
22-year-old guy. Another thing the readers didn't know was that when they sent a letter to TeenGirl Spirit, I was the first one to read it. The magazine easily received 5 or 600 pieces of mail every day. Most were contest entries (win a date with the guy from "Beverly Hills 90210," get discovered as a model, etc.). |