Category: default || By jt3y

This story isn't really relevant to anything, but I thought I'd share it anyway. Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues has been in the news recently, and I ...

Hold on. Someone at the back is laughing. What's so funny? Would you like to share it with the rest of the class?

I didn't think so.

Anyway, the play debuted while I was in college. I was working for the college newspaper when the campus women's center staged its own production, and the features editor assigned a reporter to review it.

Now, I need to explain that we were using a headline font called "Franklin Gothic," which has pretty wide letters, and that meant you couldn't fit very many words on a line. Also, the managing editor was constantly telling us that we had to use "action words" in our headlines.

You couldn't write a headline like "University To Appoint Study Committee," because that was a passive sentence, and the words "university" and "committee" were too long. Instead, you'd write something like "Deans Plan Study Group" or "Deans Study Plan Group" or "Groups Study Plan Deans" or "Plans Dean Groups Study."

The night before the paper came out, the features editor sent the page with the review over to the proofreaders, who worked in a dingy little office adjoining the newsroom. Suddenly we heard peals of laughter from next door.

The headline on the story was "'Vagina' Defines Women."

I don't remember what the new headline was, but the old one made our "wall of shame," and I although I don't think I had any headlines on the "wall of shame," I had a lot of crunks.

Actually, the worst headline I ever wrote made it into print. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws organized a rally on campus, and we had a feature photo, and I wanted to be clever and tie the rally to a current movie, so I wrote the headline ... wait for it ... "Dazed and Confused?"

Funny, right? No, it wasn't, and I have no excuse, except maybe that I was tired, smug and 19 years old, and oh, you should have seen the letters to the editor that week. We could have run them under the headline "Stupidity Defines Editor."

. . .

Speaking of Stupidity: Do you remember the Pittsburgh Regional Branding Initiative? It was a $200,000, five to 10 year campaign launched in 2002 to come up with an "image" for Pittsburgh that didn't involve steel.

Well, it seems that they let their website (brandpittsburghregion.info) expire. It's now owned by some Internet service in Equatorial Guinea. (I'm not sure what the brand of Equatorial Guinea is. "Come to Guinea and be a pig!" No?)

I suppose this means the branding was a complete success. Nice job, guys! Take an extra 200 G's out of petty cash.

. . .

(P.S. I almost wrote that the campus women's center had "mounted" a production of the play. Hee hee! Oh, grow up.)