A PILE OF PAPER.(The Talk of the Town)(parody)

One evening in February, two Stanford University seniors, Steve Yelderman and Ian Spiro, were presiding over the weekly staff meeting of The Stanford Chaparral, the college's humor magazine. Spiro, a thin and gangly computerscience major with a mop of brown hair, thick sideburns, and metal-frame glasses, was about to unveil his radical idea for the annual Chaparral parody issue.

Typical Chaparral issues are glossy compendiums of cartoons, lists, dialogues, photo journals, and short articles, but once each year, in the grand collegiate-humorist tradition, the editors produce a parody of a national magazine. In its hundred-and-five-year history, The Chaparral has targeted such publications as Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy. Yelderman and Spiro, however, felt that the genre had been exhausted. At the meeting, Yelderman, an athletic-looking electrical-engineering major who wears hip-nerd plastic glasses, announced the solution: "This year, rather than parodying National Geographic or Saturday Morning Cartoon magazine, we're going to be parodying an unbound pile of paper."

Spiro broke in. "Most magazines come bound, with a staple," he said. "We're trying to do something that's never been done. We've already got a pretty good Chinese menu going."

Staffers began tossing out story ideas--scratch-off lottery tickets, rejection letters, instructional manuals, cult solicitation pamphlets. "There's been a lot of talk of applications, or rejection letters," Yelderman said. "Maybe a pre-rejection from Harvard Law School?"

"How about a PowerPoint presentation?" someone called out.

"How about a werewolf PowerPoint presentation?" someone else countered. "It could have silver bullet points."

A few people brought up distribution questions: what would distinguish the Pile of Paper issue from, say, a pile of garbage? Before long, a list of story ideas had been generated, and the concept had evolved from a random collection of papers to one found on a particular person's desk. "We started to see a character emerge," Yelderman said.