I only vaguely remember my first 'zine, perhaps because I was 9 years old at the time. As I recall, my dad had put me to work helping him ditto tests for his freshman English students. I loved the smell of the machine's purple ink, and after I got bored sniffing the wet sheaves of paper, I decided to ditto my own little magazine.

The centerpiece of this masterpiece was a four-page story about a girl whose little brother was cleverly named "the brat." He crashed slumber parties, put toy snakes in the heroine's bed and generally behaved like a small boy, but his misdeeds attained mythic proportions in the story, in no small part because of drawings showing the brother's devil horns -- invisible to all but our heroine. It took a while to figure out how to ditto and collate eight pages so that it would come out right when stapled but once I did, I distributed it all around the neighborhood.

I basked in my publishing success all day, and then the lady next door showed a copy to my mother, who was not amused. Apparently, she thought "the brat" bore an uncanny resemblance to my own little brother. She did not think it a terrific idea to spread the news to every potential babysitter in blocks that he was a hellion of epic proportions. She was not interested in hearing my protestations that the story was totally made up. It was years before I got my hands on another ditto machine.

I tell this story not solely because I still love talking about myself in print, but also to meander around to introducing a couple of fine New York-based 'zines that, unlike my dittoed missive, are out on the newsstands right this very minute.

I knew I loved *resister* the minute I paged through its premiere issue a couple of months ago, not least because it tells the true story of a woman who got married in a chimp mask. This type of thoughtful irreverence is de rigeur for the bride, self-described "punk rock tomboy feminist" Evelyn McDonnell, music editor of the *Village Voice.* Her wedding manifesto is a piece of anarchic/feminist art ("I walk through the threshold with one hand through my lover's arm, and a can of pepper spray in the other" and "We reject laws and religions that do not sanctify relationships between man and man and woman and woman as equivalent to our own") that makes the 'zine required reading.

That first issue was lousy with talent and smarts; standouts include excerpts from a distinctly sticky novel by Lynn Breedlove and Anna Joy, and poet Tracie Morris incongruously opining about television shows like "The Tick" and "Seinfeld." (For some reason, it delights me to learn that poets watch TV.) You can imagine my glee when issue the second arrived in the P.O. Box earlier than expected this week and it turned out that the "in the city" issue was just as intelligent and subversive as the first.

This time out, McDonnell has assembled another crack team of writers and artists. Among them are one of her own longtime heroines, Patti Smith, whose song (co-penned with the late Fred "Sonic" Smith) "Summer Cannibals" serves as 'zine centerfold. Other highlights include an ode to a dead kitty by Jonathan Thomas and Angel Dean, any number of highly entertaining and moving poems, Jana Martin's simultaneously mystifying and illuminating "Field Report" and a comic by Gail Schilke that explains precisely why some of us could never live in Manhattan. *resister* is as good a reason I've seen to plunk down four bucks in a good long while: P.O. Box 1479, New York, NY 10276-1479.

For such a fan of 'zines (not to mention smart-ass women), I am woefully late to the fabulous world of *Bust.* Sure, I'd heard rumor of this rag, a sort of "*Sassy* for women in their 30s," as one friend described it. But for some reason, I still never got around to picking up a copy. It took a rainy day in a bookstore with an impending solo lunch sans reading material for it to leap off the shelf into my hands. Now, I can safely say that *Bust* is far better than a thirtysomething teenmag -- for one thing, it's got more bite than a pond full of gators.

The joys of the "Motherhood" issue are too manifold and delicious to do any kind of justice to in this space, but here goes. Much hilarity ensued upon reading the scathing diatribe, "Bring Me the Head of Melanie Banderas," which asks the burning question, "Are we really supposed to take that cyborg Betty-Boop-on-Percodan impersonation as sexy?" Creepy pathos, the kind that only comes from truth with a capital T, permeates "My Mother, My Hell." It takes an unimaginable amount of guts to write the line, "When mom finally died a couple of years ago we were, quite frankly, relieved." Gulp.

*Bust* keeps being naked and bitchy and funny as hell by turns, but always with a blistering heap of street-smarts, the kind that makes me want to run out and drag these women to an awards ceremony where they'll all get diamond tiaras. Since I don't have so much as a rhinestone in the house, I'll just urge you to get a hold of *Bust* soonest, and read it cover to cover. It's better than (almost) anything that ever came off a ditto machine.