Famous People #57: Avril Le’Zine, the zine about Avril Lavigne
Kaitlyn: The first issue of Avril Le’Zine, the zine about Avril Lavigne, almost never came to be.
First of all, Katie and I were drunk watching New York Minute when we came up with the idea and we could have forgotten it. Second, when Katie and I were discussing the best way to bring it into the world, we decided the most elegant look would be newsprint paper, which I ordered 1,500 sheets of on the spot. This cost a mere $30 including shipping, so I do wonder why the newspaper business is in such shambles. Months later, after the Google Docs had been edited and the doodles painstakingly smushed into low-resolution PDFs, we arrived at the FedEx Office on Court Street with a flash drive and 1,500 sheets of newsprint paper, only to find that copy machines from 1983 can not in fact handle newsprint paper. They crinkle it up and then scream error messages at you. After 14 failed attempts to do absolutely nothing differently other than praying a little harder each time, for the same result of mutilated newspaper and an ever-growing tab on my only recently paid-off Chase Visa, we gave up and went with the regular copy paper we had pulled out of the printer and piled all over the floor. We were there for another four hours, and left $130 poorer, with stress sweat pit-stains and a bad relationship with the other guests of the FedEx Office on Court Street.
A few days later, I let myself into Katie’s apartment, arranged hundreds of pages of our friends’ essays about suburban malaise and skateboards on her kitchen table, and stared at them with love in my eyes. She came home and dropped a full glass of seltzer into the middle of it and we both said HAHAHAHAHA to keep from crying. We ran in a circle and squeezed our eyes shut, and would you believe it? The seltzer slid off the paper as if it were air. Truly! Science does not know this, but you can dunk copy paper in a bucket of seltzer and nothing will happen. We stared into the overhead light and thought, imagine if it had been the newsprint paper. It would surely have dissolved into pounds and pounds of blurry mascara pulp. The only entity on our side all along, it turns out, was the horrible copier at the FedEx Office on Court Street. If it had functioned even close to correctly, no one would have gotten the opportunity to spend $3 on Avril Le’Zine in a metal bar in Greenpoint! Hardly anyone did anyway, but that’s not the point.
Lizzie: I can confirm that Avril Le’Zine (no one ever told me why it’s French masculine?) was made with very sturdy paper stock. Sturdier than most zines I’ve held in my hands. It’s nice to know it can take a few hits and bounce back, just like Avril’s career. Actually when I Google “avril lavigne” right now, the first thing that comes up in the news section is an article from Metalheadzone.com titled, AVRIL LAVIGNE BROKE HER SOCIAL MEDIA SILENCE WITH AN ASTONISHING PHOTO. The article informs us that, in the photo, featuring Avril Lavigne in a black dress, Avril was “looking very beautiful and attractive in the black dress” and that one fan named Sebastian commented, “You are a beautiful girl, Avril Lavigne.”
Kaitlyn: I was a little bit shocked by the reaction to Avril Le’Zine. Most of the people who saw it on my Instagram or Twitter account did not seem to know what it was, despite it being, I thought, quite obvious. “So it’s all about Avril Lavigne?” they would ask. No! Is The Atlantic about oceans? Is The Paris Review a collection of reviews of Paris? Avril Le’Zine is about malls and celebrity divorce. Also, okay, it’s about Avril Lavigne, and our friend Vrinda mishearing a lyric from “Things I’ll Never Say,” which she once believed was a song about oral sex. And also, okay, Lizzie correctly hearing a lyric from “My World” and thinking about it for the rest of her life.
Lizzie: In her initial email to her group of freelancers, Kaitlyn said we should “use Avril as a prompt however you see fit.” I haven’t read the whole thing yet (but I did move with it, which is more than I might do for a zine of lesser paper stock). I assume some people did some exciting things with this prompt.
I got to St. Vitus at around 8:30, having killed as much time as I could manage without just standing outside in order to arrive fashionably late. The show hadn’t started yet, so I was still technically early, and that’s how things work out sometimes.
Kaitlyn gave me a free zine, but now I’m thinking maybe I should’ve paid for it, as a gesture of support.
Kaitlyn: As I said, not many people lined up to put $3 each into the Glossier bubble-pouch I brought for payments, but in their defense I kept forgetting I was holding it and wandering away from the merch table. I had a lot to get done! I had to listen to James and Sam sing some beautiful new songs about getting older and sadder, if more financially stable. I had to drink my first two rum-and-cokes of Dry January, and I had to, as a result, explain to Rebecca and her boyfriend, at length, that there was once a Golf Lexapro song with my name in it on SoundCloud but then James deleted it and I’ll never get to hear it again. If you know anything about me and how passionate I am about wedging my biography into as many pieces of content that strangers will be able to consume on the web for decades to come as possible, you’ll know this is the tragedy of my life. Anyway, Rebecca wrote about neckties for Avril Le’Zine! She was our fashion correspondent—the only woman up to the task, as you well know.
Lizzie: For awhile I talked to Rebecca about how we had both just found new apartments to live in and had to stop myself from complaining too much about how shitty the process was. Now I’m trying to figure out how to feel like I even live where I currently live. I also got a tall boy of MHL cause I was standing there like, “oh god what do you even do at a bar?” When the bands were playing it was really too loud to talk, even in the part that wasn’t the actual “venue.”
Ashley and Brandon showed up, the most beautiful and cleanest people at the bar. It made me wish I had showered. Brandon told a truly riveting story about how he installed a shelf in his room and one night while he was lying on his bed at an unusual angle it fell down onto his face!! There was definitely heavy stuff on it too I think. His brother thought he died or was maimed. “You need to find studs and use anchors!” I said, acting like I knew a lot about shelf/wall relationships. “I don’t know!” he said. His face was not crushed or anything, it looked fine.
Kaitlyn: To me, the night really ascended to the next level when Ashley came back from a month in California and ordered a White Claw. She was glowing! She bought two copies of Avril Le’Zine, and flashed a twenty so the room would think we were doing big business. She really knows how to make a crowded metal bar in the dreaded winter of 2020 seem like a relaxing backyard barbecue in the summer of 2019. Were we ever that young? We were and we still are. I was separated from her for much of the night by my sales duties, but I felt a warm, fizzy peace just being in orbit of her and her lime seltzer. She still had the California on her! When I left, she was ordering another White Claw and telling people “we’re chillin.”
Lizzie: I didn’t even know you could get White Claw at a bar. “You can get White Claw here?” I asked Ashley, as if she had maybe just taken it out of her tote. After Golf Lexapro played, I took a car home and got carsick which happens basically anytime a driver is doing that jerky thing where they speed up to a red light and then slam on the brakes. What is that! Made me think of the part in that song where James sings, “If I vomit in this cab” etc, etc. I didn’t barf though.
Kaitlyn: Katie and I rode the G train together and counted our money—not much. Certainly not anywhere near the roughly $200 we had invested. But we agreed we were proud of ourselves for committing to a bit.
PARTY REVIEW METRICS:
Did anyone bring a dog?
Kaitlyn: No one ever does. We should take this out of the template!
Did we hear any good secrets?
Kaitlyn: Via an essay in Avril Le’Zine, we learned that someone Stephanie went to high school with is an irredeemable liar. For the rest of that juicy tale I guess you’ll have to Venmo me $3 plus shipping.
Lizzie: This newsletter is really just an effort to recoup some of Kaitlyn’s printing costs. Please help.
Did anyone get engaged?
Kaitlyn: Of course not. Would you get engaged at a bar where there are upside-down crosses on all of the walls?
Lizzie: Everyone knows you should only get engaged at bars where there are right-side up crosses on the walls.
Did anyone get famous?
Kaitlyn: Although sales for Avril Le’Zine were slow and mostly to people who had to buy them out of obligation to us as friends or Twitter “mutuals,” the crowd for the Golf Lexapro set was absolutely out of control! I barely had room to boogie. Tamar was overcome with fan feelings. I think it’s safe to say James and Sam are famous in a circle that includes lots of lonely girl bloggers and boys applying for law school and will soon get picked up by some faction of Stan Twitter—maybe defecting Beliebers?—and then they will be so famous they will stop talking to me, but my claim to having my name mentioned just one time on a long-disappeared B-side will be my main cocktail party talking point for the rest of my boring life.
PARTY SCORE:
Kaitlyn: Terrible return on investment! But worth it for the proximity to escalating fame.
Lizzie: A reminder that print’s not dead! It’s only dying!