I read Seventeen magazine religiously from 6th grade until I graduated and the 2nd new editor in my subscription time period turned it into something more like YM, which you would buy at Longs but never subscribe to. It was pretty fantastic in its own right, mostly for its quizzes which invariably gave you hope that you and the boy were ultimately very compatible, and the painfully edited embarrassing stories, like a boy sees a tampon in your purse, or you sneeze on his sweater when you lean in to kiss him. These stories, as I recall, were rated on the embarrassment scale, and I don't know if they even have that section anymore, but they were all about solidarity, if nothing else. Carrying around a copy of YM at Clovis West High School was a temporary key to popularity in my experience, especially in the Spring when the teachers were feeling lazy and you would do busywork or group work at your desk and you could sneak it out to read the stories and do the quizzes, hoping that people like Onna Mehas and Misty Tutt wouldn't actually write in your magazine when they took the quiz. Still, I probably didn't care that much because it meant they acknowledged you did something hip and good for them - ultimately the goal, after all.
But Seventeen I subscribed to, and kept every issue stacked on my floor, much to my mom's perpetual irritation; I think I was grounded more than once for its untidiness. When Tierra and Tawna came to visit we spent hours reading them on my bed, trying out the hairstyles, trying to figure out how people's mothers would let them wear strapless dresses to the prom, reading about the It boy of the moment. There was also a trend to get the binders for school that had the view pocket on the front so you could make collages from your mags - essentially an advertisement for competing brands you thought were cool: Esprit, Guess, Polo. We cut out only the words, and glued them along with whatever else to some cardstock, as if cutting it out of a magazine made you as cool as if you owned the clothes themselves, which, incidentally, I did not.
I'm not sure my mom ever really believed this, but my affair with the mag was 95% based on the fiction, which I'm not entirely certain is still a feature. People like Joyce Carol Oates and Lorrie Moore and Sylvia Plath had all once been published in Seventeen, and I distinctly remember searching out The Bell Jar in the Clovis West Library and being scared to death by "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" I used to flip through the whole thing - backwards, for some reason - and look at the skinny girls and their outrageous clothes, read the Sex + Your Body column, and look at the cute famous boy article first, always saving the fiction until I could hardly stand it anymore. Each year, when the fiction contest happened, I would just die with jealousy for the girl who won, and desperately want to be the person who could be published in what I saw as essentially The New Yorker for tragic teenage girls with a little talent.
I'm remembering all this because today I listened again to a story I loved from This American Life - "Like It Or Not" it's called, and the third act is a story about something called Jubilee, which takes place at indiscriminate times on Mobile Bay, Alabama and has as much to do with bizarre tidal patterns as dumb luck. (As it turns out, there is a Miss Jubilee and a Miss Teen Jubilee, I am happy to report, which makes the whole thing even more fantastic than I can handle.) Though the fabulousness of the story and the event could merit an entire article in itself, how I mean to connect it is that the woman who tells the story is named Curtis Sittenfeld, and I suddenly remembered her name from the contest; she was the envied winner in 1992. I think I vaguely remember her story, (and fortunately if I dig through all my crap I will most likely be able to find it, as I ripped out the fiction from all those piled Seventeens before I went to college and my mom insisted they be chucked) about a girl whose mother had died, or something equally confusing and difficult. Doing a Google search on Ms. Sittenfeld brings up a crop of articles - she has become, I guess, what people who have the guts to enter contests and eventually be published ought to be: a writer by profession. And just the fact that I've thought about this all day and have almost emailed her something like "Hi, I wish I were a writer and you're good and I'm so jealous and did you really go to Stanford and then The Writer's Workshop and how am I 28 and doing nothing about anything?" hopefully more eloquent than that, but still. I sort of feel like I've known her since 1992 and then suddenly we've become reacquainted, and I'm just bummed out over here because thinking about Seventeen reminds me of what I used to want to be, and I feel kind of like I sold out to my own laziness or fear or excuses or whatever else stupid thing keeps me from doing what I claim to want the most. So, Curtis, if you ever happen upon this page through some random Googling of yourself, good job on knowing how to do the next thing.
