Friends Hitting the Big Time

Have you experienced this? Maybe not even a close friend, but an acquaintance, or someone who went to your high school, maybe?

Many of my friends, acquaintances, and high school alumnae have gone on to greatness. There's the old (think: jr. high) boyfriend who is a rock star; another old boyfriend who is a big shot at the Extreme Games, yet another boyfriend who is now at the forefront of nanotechnology, and many who just went on to become successful accountants, lawyers, doctors, what have you.

In my own nano-fame period, when I published a chick 'zine in Denver, CO, I ran in to many of the above-mentioned folk around town. Often, it was while I was bartending. That's how I raised money for my magazine. Anyway, they'd come in to the bar and either be cool or be white-suburbanites-drinking-tee-many-martoonis. They'd ask for my number, saying, "We should totally go out sometime! You're cool!"

These guys would often come in, always as shitfaced as a human can be without actually expiring on the spot. They started a 'zine, too. It's what you did in the '90s, don't you know. The pulpy covers, the hysterical story ideas and sure-to-offend guides to drunkness were and are a big hit with the hipsters and barhounds of Denver. We considered doing a Hootchie-Mama/Modern Drunkard edition (with accompanying co-ed bar-crawling event), but it never came to fruition. Pity.

Here it is 2006, almost, and here is old Frank Rich, married and successfully published, joking around with Tucker Carlson.