The Buffalo Bits Articles ARE HERE!!!!!
Looking back, I guess you could generalize and say that we were just your typical high school girls: giggly, boy-crazy, and gossipy. Because really, we were all of those things. What enabled us to transcend that part of our existence and become something else entirely was an intrinsic quality that could be found in both of us: A rowdy and irreverent sense of humor. So like I said, we giggled, we talked about boys, and we gossiped, but we were so much more than that... Karen and I were the queens of sarcasm and soon to become the newest inheritors of a long literary tradition of satire..
I couldn't tell you when it all started, but I can tell you about the turning point that would allow us to hone our satirical skills. Karen was a freshly inaugurated senior (a position of guaranteed authority), and as a junior, I was just getting used to my new status as a cocky upperclassman. Not that either of us had ever been afraid of exposing our extreme level of weirdness, but I think that it just happened to be the perfect time for what we started that year. We had both been challenging the traditions of high school, but suddenly, we were ready to join forces and ridicule the social system together and publicly.
So, we decided to write a fashion column. Yes, our version of challenging the social system of high school was to write a fashion column. What you don't understand is that we couldn't very well raise our hands in class and say "um, yeah, we'd like to write a subversive column mocking all the idiots in this school and the cliques that they belong to." That sort of display does not get you a column – feigned interest in the teen fashion culture, however, does.
Hence, in addition to our duties as Advertising Editor (Karen) and Layout Editor (me), we were now co-writers of a new fashion column for our school newspaper. The first issue of The White Buffalo didn't come out for a couple of months that fall, so we had quite a bit of time to mull over what we should do with our powerful new positions. It turned out that rather than spend that time doing serious fashion research, we would end up with a serious crisis about what to call our column. The resolution to this problem came from an incident that virtually created the subculture known as "Stevism."
It happened that previous to the birth of our column, Karen was dating a very pretty boy who just didn't quite have a lot going on underneath his carefully-tended hairdo. (Honestly, it's a wonder the guy could stand up straight, let alone go to high school). To give credit where credit is due, I did have the great fortune of being the one who introduced R*** to Karen, but I must insist that everyone remember she's the one who dated him for six months. That boy really entertained us. Even before the phone incident, we got innumerable mileage out of his frequent faux pas, trademark pretty-boy comments, and repeated attempts to act intellectual.
It happened one night that R*** decided (for reasons which shall forever be known only to him) to call Karen at midnight on a school night. Her father answered the phone, and needless to say, was disgruntled to find a 17-year-old male calling his daughter in the middle of the night. When Karen's father demanded to know who was calling, R*** replied, "This is R----oh, wait, I mean, uh, um, this is..... Steve. Yeah, man, this is Steve" (or something to that effect, of course). And then he promptly hung up on Karen's dad. Well, we all knew the identity of the not-so-mysterious "Steve," and practically from the minute Karen related the details to me, we had that boy tried, convicted, and sent to the chair for being a total idiot. The "Steve" jokes were unending, and before long Karen and I were referring to each other almost exclusively as "Steve." The funny thing was, R*** never got the joke. To this day, I'm sure he can't figure out why we kept calling each other Steve all of the time. Perhaps even funnier is that fact that Karen kept dating him, at least for awhile.
Now, not only were Karen and I calling each other Steve, but the new co-nickname gained popularity with everyone else around us. Few other people knew the origin of "Steve" (we didn't want to totally embarrass R***), but within a month, it was a school-wide phenomenon. All of our friends and even some teachers had taken to calling both of us "Steve." Anyone who was anyone had some idea of the "Steve" cult that was developing. Freshman who knew about it were particularly enamored of the idea, some of them even trying to call themselves "Steve" and follow us around the halls before class.
So, when it came time to name our fashion column, it seemed unquestionable that we would somehow grace our work with our new nickname. That fall, "Steve's Buffalo Bits" appeared as a new feature column in The White Buffalo. It really should be noted that our original title, "Steve's Buffalo Chips," was quickly turned down by our faculty editor as well as all of the other Journalism II students. Anyway, upon publication of the first issue, "Steve's Buffalo Bits" was the talk of the school... or at least the talk of anyone who actually read the school newspaper.
Sometimes, instead of going to class, we'd just hang out here.
Not bad, eh?
And one time, we left a little message to our fans in the sandstone at the cove.
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