Friday, March 14, 2008

 

Been a while

Been a while since I meandered over here. Sounds like the Mad Cow reunion was awesome. The pictures look great and make me a little teary-eyed for the good old days.

Chris, your Onion experience sounds so awesome! I read the "susan sarandon for old-time's sake" article the other day. What a coincidence. And I love ONN. We're all so proud of you for even being in the same building it's created in!

Hope everyone's doing well. Great to see you a few months ago.


Tuesday, March 11, 2008

 

For Erik

Since you requested a description of The Onion, here it is.

So they're located in SoHo. I got there 45 minutes early and walked around the building for a while so I didn't seem like an Early Eddie. I went up at quarter to six and there was a big ass onion on the door with a small note to us ONN headline contributors to meet in the back. I walked in and there was no receptionist or anything, just a giant open room with a bunch of people who couldn't care less that I was there.

The office is very nice. Hardwood floors, framed headlines on the wall, open work stations with computers everywhere set up in different clusters for different groups of writers, advertising people, and art folks. They had separate offices for the editors.

I went into the back and couldn't find anyone who knew anything. I told a guy I was there for the contributor's meeting and he was like, "Wasn't that last night?" After freaking out for a second, I found out it was the right night and sat in a conference room used as the writing room. On the walls were a bunch of white boards with headlines scrawled with dates next to them. I saw a couple really good ones that have since been on the site, like "Susan Sarandon Masturbated to For Old-Time's Sake."

Since I was the first one there, I just sat there twiddling my thumbs until another writer showed up. He was like, "Um...is this the writer's meeting?" I said, "Sure" even though i obviously didn't know any more than he did. After sitting around for a minute and reading the headlines and trying to play cool, I said, "So, on a scale of 1-surreal, how surreal is this?" and he was like, "Thank God you said something!" Then we giggled like a couple of schoolgirls backstage at a Ricky Martin concert. After that the first guy and I watched as every other writer sulked in and was like, "Is this the writer's room?" It was like sitting in the bordello and watching all the virgins creeping in.

The actual meeting was cool. It was led by Carol who used to be Editor-in-Chief and now runs the ONN. They gave us tips, told us what they are and aren't looking for, and showed us two videos that were still in post-production, including the one about the 500 kidneys that went up last night and a great one called "The High School Tony's" which I'm sure will be up soon.

Overall it was a fun experience. It was nice to hear the editors tell us not to get discouraged by rejection, because they submit lists every week, too, that are full of rejections. Even if I never end up catching on with them, it was great to, at least for one night, be in the place and looked upon as a writer for The Onion.

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