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03/02/2003 Entry: "MHS SF&F Club - A Tribute to a Band of Irregulars" I think it's about time I start a story about my youth that does NOT suck. I am sick of seeing my posts about how my life used to suck as a kid, so I am taking a break; damn what makes "good material." But on a board I am on, someone asked about good high school memories, and I have one that stands out really well. The McLean High School Science Fiction and Fantasy Club, or MHS2F2C as I tried to get everyone to call it ... but it never caught on. It was my first foray into a social life, and a bridge from theater into the fandom community. They were a colonial rag tag fleet continuing their flight from Mundane tyranny in a search for the lost Fandom, while fleeing planet Earth. Boldly going where no fan has gone before. The Force was with us and our cry of "We is no longer ordinary," could be heard during one of our many parties or hotel rooms. I don't know much about the history of the club, except it started in 1975 because the "Literary club" was pretty much all sci-fi fans. In fact, we thought for years we were still the "official literary club," even though years later, another one popped up in my Junior Yearbook with only two Korean girls as members and no teacher sponsor. Well, no one ever bothered us about it. Our sponsor was Mr. McAffee, a biology teacher and possible ex-hippie who signed our authorization forms and never showed up to meetings. He would say, "I don't want to be seen with you weirdoes!" but in a loving way. I mean, he liked us, but chose not to "fraternize" with us, hinting that he might get in trouble for doing so. But he was our blank check, really, to the school. I first saw the club in my freshman year, and it was so chaotic and people were screaming and I frankly got scared and excused myself. The theater people were constantly crossing over, and one of my first bridge friends was Julie Bratten (skinny, fashionable Bill Joel fan) and Kirk VanQuill (the wonderful flaming guy who mowed our lawn). Kurt took me to the 1983 World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore (Constellation), and left me with some filking Trekkies under a flight of stairs for three hours. I was all of 14, and scared silly. So when I saw them as a club, I was scared for the same reason. I was too serious and easily weirded out. Kurt later told me that he left me a goal (he graduated in my freshman year) to "round up all the loners and misfits like myself and find a band of my own." I also left theater that year, because our teacher Mr. Duncan was a total burnout. I never returned to the stage until I was 20 years old with the group "And the Prune Bran Players." So the next year, my sophomore year, Julie and her friends Britta Carlsten and Amy Polk persuaded me to give the club another try. I am glad I did. I loved it. It became the starting point to all my life. Memories are sketchy now. I have some old newsletters packed in a box somewhere, and I dug them out. I haven't seen them in YEARS ... and boy do they bring back memories. We didn't have a lot of Newsletters, because ... well, as the old Fanzine people probably remember, usually by the second issue of ANYTHING, the editor was already begging for new material. The first one on this small pile I see is dated "20-XIII-1984." I mentions we're going to see the new films of the time, "Buckaroo Banzai," "Baby," "2010," and "Dune!" A hint at last years "Alberto Mousse fights" at a convention is mentioned. Whomever was the editor at the time mentions that her and her friend "Jan" are designing tee-shirts with the "Purple Tangerine" logo/mascot our club had. We even had a song about it, sung to the tune of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." The third issue mentions me for the first time, as their Evecon 2 liaison. Ha ha. Boy, what foreshadowing. By Evecon 4, I was guest artist and panelist. Thanks for giving me a chance, Bruce and Cheryl! More issues mention the same themes that teen fans at the time were going through: More begs for submissions, an editorial on how disorganized we were, debates on who was really in charge of weekly meetings, and tons of photocopied comic strips from Bloom County (before Opus was the star), The Far Side, and any comic strip that even barely mentioned anything science fiction related. Then no newsletter until I took over the club in my senior year. Let me back up a bit. My sophomore year was my intro into fandom. Julie, Britta, and Amy sat be down before my first con away from home, Balticon 18. For nearly two hours, they taught me the basics of fandom, tolerance, and some part they called "love triangles," which was really more about general con romance stuff that happens to teens. They pumped into my head stuff I still carry with me today, like my first introduction to real homosexuals (both sexes), tolerance towards other modes of thought, and the oft-used "nod and smile" approach to listening to crazy rhetoric. Other tips were not so white hat, like how to fake only a few people living in a hotel room when there are really over 12, how to keep the soda machines from running out before the con's end (put an "out or order" sign on them), and some stuff about drug use I probably should not mention because it may implicate some people. Most of my "back street" knowledge of "deviant" sexual practices (now just considered kinky) were from these talks. While 95% of the stuff we did was typical geeky sci-fi related activities, it seemed I was thrown into a world of young teens who had the knowledge and experience of most seasoned adults. I *thrived* with these people. They were *my* people. They seemed more real to me than anything else in my life, and quickly, fandom seemed like my home and the rest of the world was some play I had to act in. Because of this club, my first club (paid for) was Evecon 2. First club event away was Balticon 18. First con away where the parties got out of control was Disclave 85. What was odd was our club paid for these activities with money we raised. The money we raised went to pay for con memberships, hotel rooms, and party "necessities." I can't swear to it, but I have always suspected some of that money went to pay for liquor. I never drank, but some of the members drank quite a bit at parties, although that was more a McLean "bored upper middle class" thing more than a fandom thing. We did have rules for being in the hotel room at cons. No liquor or drugs allowed, although I suspect some people had stashes of whatever in their suitcase. Not that they needed it, because the con parties never carded. I mean, they'd clip your badge to show you were under 18, but most of us used the "party stickers" (some parties gave stickers, and it was some sort of game to see who could collect the most stickers on their badges) to cover those corners up. Even Disclave had fee "bheer" (beer) in their con suite for the longest time. No one ever guarded those taps. We also had a rule, by internal request, of "no romantic congress allowed." We had a sub rule that said "anyone engaged in romantic congress will be allowing us to point, gawk, make comments, and rearrange bodies for a better view." Only one person broke that, and he left after the "make comments" stage. Funding came from annual school fundraisers that every other school club got. We usually sold a LOT of candy because we always got the "cool candy" (M&Ms), and we sold it relentlessly. While in my sophomore and junior year we were not among the top sellers, in our senior year ... we cleaned out. We sold almost two pallets of M&M's because of two good ideas. First, our stupid principal, Mrs. Lodal, made it a rule we could no longer sell the candy during school hours (it was competing with our new cafeteria vending machines). So most of the clubs did the honorable thing, and tried to sell door-to-door with limited success. We simply went underground, and it was like we were drug dealers. I kept a supply in a hollowed-out notebook, while others kept them hidden in jackets or their purses. We each sold almost a box of 50 count M&M boxes every two days because demand was so high and supply was so low. The next brilliant idea was using our friend Jason Aufdenberg at Marshall High School (a rival school) to also sell them. They didn't have a sci-fi club, and the students he sold to didn't know or care. We had more money that year than we knew what to do with. In the end, we had a HUGE dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, and spent the rest on a huge amount of Silly Putty we used to make a bust of someone I have since forgotten (no matter, Silly Putty in that amount can't hold it's shape against gravity anyway). We didn't just go to cons, we also went to movie premieres, dressed up in crazy fannish costumes. We also went to Rocky Horror, but in the interest of some of these people's parents, I won't go into how their daughter learned 99 names for venereal diseases in a rhyming love couplet. We would dress up funny, go to some mall, get stared at, get asked questions by mall security, and finally end up at some IHOP or Lums somewhere, drinking coffee and having jokes about giving blowjobs using catsup bottles. In my senior year, I was at my height of geekdom by being elected Vice President. Okay, how I was elected was strange. The previous year, a bunch of graduating members declared I was the next year's president. But no one remembered next year, which slightly pissed me off at the time. They held an election, which considered slightly unfair because, like most clubs, we'd lose 40-50% of our members by the third meeting, and all the freshmen didn't know who anyone was, or the "old legacy" left behind. But the president they did elect... I can't complain. His name was Mike Hoffheimer, and his primary campaign was "if elected, I promise not to show up to meetings." He won by a landslide, leaving only 3 votes for myself and a girl named Stacey Scott. We both ran the club that year, sometimes having a friendly battle of power. We often said the person in charge was whomever could yell the loudest that day. I ran the newsletter, and it died after two issues because no one submitted anything (sound familiars?). The last issue, dated October 1986, stated we were not participating in a "school club parade" because the "McLean reads the comics" theme was a lame idea, and nobody liked the idea of having school spirit crammed down our throat. Sadly, the club fell apart after my class graduated. When the class before our graduated, we lost almost 80% of our core members. These were the people that drove the club into doing weird and fun stuff. Stacey and I just didn't have the ... wild streak in us to promote such stuff (thank God for Mike). We ran on inertia, and when we graduated, the club lost all but a handful of members, and almost had to start with 100% fresh blood. [Warning: the following is based on sketchy rumor and poor memory] I heard from the few remaining members it got lame, meetings were rarely attended, and finally, the school clamped down on us. It seems our sponsor, who hated the principal, either quit or was forced to resign. No one would take our club, and since there wasn't a core group to keep it going ... it died. I have also heard it came back two years later, but I haven't heard anything since. I miss those guys. Stacey is now Stacey Lanzilotta, and Mike is now a successful artist in Maine, married, with kids. Kurt Van Quill works at UCSF as an assiatant professor of Ophthalmology. I wish I knew what happened Amy Polk, Britta Carlsten, and Julie Bratten. If anyone knows, can you e-mail me? We is still no longer ordinary...