A baldy but a goodie

By Joe Wilbur

"I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people." - Mark Twain, author and journalist

When I joined The Tattoo I thought my writing could make people laugh long enough that they’d forget to ask anything more of me. Turned out I wasn’t that funny.

In the first piece of any substance I wrote, a Tattoo colleague and I made fun of the town’s teen beauty queens and got hate mail for weeks. In the second I was told to watch my language by an English teacher at my high school.

I wrote a lot about music and politics — which will almost always get you in trouble. But it seemed I ticked people off even when I was writing about school plays and doing movie reviews.

The Tattoo’s writers and advisors taught me that making peoples’ teeth grind isn’t always a bad thing — it means you’ve gotten under someone’s skin and maybe even made them think.

A box full of awards and a few thousand dollars in scholarship money later, I was running my college newspaper and paying the bills writing for daily newspapers.

Under my bed I keep a small box of "thank you" notes from people who’ve enjoyed my writing and found it worthwhile. My box of hate mail and death threats is so large I have to keep it in the closet.

I love them equally and wouldn’t have either without The Tattoo.

Click on the links below to read the stories, columns and reviews that Joe Wilbur wrote for The Tattoo.