Here is every page from every issue of Waiting For Lunch Magazine (save #14, which is 80% reprints), which I edited and published in high school. The graphics are fuzzy, but these are here for archeological amusement. Right now, #3, #4, and #15 are for sale from this site.
The History of Waiting
For Lunch Magazine
Waiting For Lunch Magazine was a humor rag published from March, 1996 through June,
1998. During this time I attended Fraser High School and was bored with the school's paper
The Flash. I had just moved back to Fraser after living several years in Troy and attending 9th grade
at Troy High School*. THS had a paper called The Northend, which, due to an adventurous
journalism teacher, actually covered risqué issues including racial tension and abortion. I was
pretty disappointed to find that The Flash was only really good at letting everyone know what
would be for lunch during the month of October (more so after I met the founder of the paper,
Arline Eddy, who was genuinely passionate about putting out an interesting read). At first I
thought I could help remedy the situation by writing for it, but that didn't change anything. Often,
regardless of the topic, articles were arbitrarily reworded and published without the authors'
knowledge of the tampering. At this time some friends and I had already put out a few issues of
WFL, but they weren't really geared towards school. Beginning with my Junior year, we began
including a pullout section called "The Filch" which usually directly parodied the previous issue of
The Flash. This pullout also included articles about things going on in school that The Flash
wouldn't touch (the prestigious choir's drunken trip to San Francisco, for example). I was fortunate
to have supportive teachers that encouraged creativity and reacted rationally to satire (Ms.
Borrelli, Mr. Boyd, Mrs. Davis, Mr. Gioletti, Mr. Hart, Mr. Kuppe, Mr. Ladson, Mrs. Schell, Mr.
Zogas, and principal Rick Repicky, to name a few). Somehow I managed to mostly not have classes with the
teachers, whom shall go nameless, that did not act rationally to satire. By writing half of every
issue, working on a deadline, and actually putting real money into this thing, I managed to learn
things that the classes in high school couldn't get across. Putting WFL out also opened the
floodgates to a world of small press and zines (including the many fascinating people who
publish them) which I literally hadn't known existed until I was doing one.
*Hi, Miss Borden!