Pt. I can be found here. When I discovered that my new friend, Carrie, had been a finalist in the 1992 Sassiest Girl in America contest, I screamed and freaked out and she handled it much more nicely than the 1990 Sassiest Girl, who to be fair was not my friend and I had ambushed her in the creepiest way possible on the first day of school. She showed me the magazine, and I remembered…
"The Least Sassy Girl in America, Pt. II" will run later today.
From a very young age, what I wanted most in the world was to be discovered by and taken in hand by an older, wiser, cooler, female mentor. My mother has always been very supportive and encouraging, which I now know is far from universal, but as much as I enjoyed and counted on her attention and praise, I also dismissed
Jaya Saxena's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Whenever I’ve told this story it’s always supposed to be funny. It goes like this:
We had been flirting for a few weeks, because I was 19 and green mohawks still did it for me. I ran into him at a party, where we continued flirting, and I drank Everclear mixed with Sprite like it was any sort of good
Lindsay King-Miller's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I don’t remember why I asked for a Sleater-Kinney CD for Christmas the year I turned thirteen. I didn’t know anyone who listened to them; all my friends that year were rocking out to guy groups like Nirvana and Green Day. In the throes of my generic adolescent angst, I loved those bands for their noise and their rage, but
The summer after my freshman year in high school, I took my first real job. Not the first time I’d be working really hard or getting paid, but the first time I needed paperwork. I was 14, uncomfortable with every inch of my body, shy.
Minimum wage was $4.15 an hour, at least in Alaska, but without expenses like a car or kids or booze habit, the money added up nicely.
1. 10 Things I Hate About You, 9:50pm Sat 5/1/99 If Alana and I were characters in 10 Things I Hate About You, she would be Kat (Julia Stiles) and I would be Shakespeare Girl (Shakespeare Girl.) I always thought myself more literary than her, but she read way better books. Alana smoked pot and went to parties, I drank Slurpees and went to youth group, and together, we drove around listening to the radio or…
Amy Laburda last wrote about Oklahoma! When I was 14, Rent was important to me in a way I find it hard to overstate. My parents were well used to my latching onto a musical and playing the cast recording over and over again. But when I had been toting around Phantom of the Opera five years earlier, I didn’t need a perfectly trained memory to know when to turn down the volume so…
Before we parted ways at the airport, my mother handed me an envelope. From its size I knew that it held a greeting card, but its thickness revealed that there was something hidden in between those cardboard words of farewell. She told me to open it. Inside there was money, which I half expected. I knew that she wouldn’t be able to help herself even though I told her that there would be no need…
I spent a lot of my first two years of college sick. The source of my physical unraveling had little to do with the normal collegiate vices. I didn’t experience a hangover until my senior year and I was often struck by a case of temporary muteness around people of the opposite sex. I even avoided The Great Pink Eye Outbreak that ravaged our campus during my freshman year. (How bad was that outbreak? So…
At one time or another I had most of the crushes expected of a straight, teen girl growing up in the 1990s. My rather ridiculous Leonardo DiCaprio phase resulted in my owning a VHS copy of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, tearing pictures out of teen glossies, and regularly updating a fan website that has thankfully disappeared into the internet ether. When not outing my ownership of said site on publicly read blogs of note,…
Recently, I screened The Punk Singer, the new documentary film about Kathleen Hanna, the feminist activist and lead singer for the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre who co-founded the riot grrrl movement in the early ‘90s. In the film, Hanna talked about her first solo project Julie Ruin, which she recorded by herself in her bedroom. She said she wanted the album to reach other girls who were also in their bedrooms and…
