WORD FROM THE CHIEF by Sir Theodore W. Love Editor-In-Chief, The Full Moon You know, every time I sit back and look over an issue of the Full Moon hot off of the press, I can't help but swell up with a feeling of gratitude for the unique opportunity it is to have this job. I worked in the business for a lot of years, and for most of them I never dreamed that one day I'd be sitting in this office doing this. My first break into the business came back in the sixties, when I was just an unemployed photographer looking for a great op. It was the middle of the afternoon in south Chicago, and I was out for a stroll when I just happened on Eldridge Cleaver as he was drinking a cup of coffee and browsing through a copy of Vogue. Now, I was raised to be a polite young man. I always said "yes, ma'am, no ma'am, and all of that stuff. But I knew that when it came to good photos, you gotta shoot first and ask permission later. So I just pulled that there camera right up to my eye and nailed poor old Eldridge. You can imagine he wasn't too happy, but I was too sick of bread and butter to care much about his political image. I sold that shot to Time Magazine for twenty dollars, and bought me a fine pair of boots with sequins on them that a man said used to belong to Elvis Presley. That there was the start of thirty years of taking pictures for different magazines. Of course, luck like I had with Eldridge didn't come along too often. Actually it never came up again. Once and a while I'd get a stock photo into someone's archives, but for the most part I just worked in the circulation department. But I'll tell you what. There wasn't a finer magazine distributer in the entire country from 1972-1986, my friend. You know those little subscription slips that come in magazines? The little paper ones? I invented those in 1973. Sure did. And Good Housekeeping gave me a bonus for it, too. Anyways, to make a long story short, round about the turn of the millenium I had me a job with the New Yorker. Got in the door when I promised them I'd call on all of their delinquent accounts. I don't think they'd have given me the gig without the year I'd spent writing obits for the New London Examiner in Momence, Illinois, but regardless, there I was an employee of the New Yorker. One day, I think it was in April of 2001, I get this call from a guy that's complaining because we never run articles by Woody Allen anymore. I tell him we haven't gotten any material from Woody in twenty years, but all he tells me is that if we didn't stop running that Steve Martin feces-his word-that he'd cancel his subscription. Well I talked to him for a while, cause at the New Yorker we really cared about our customers, and I figured that if he hung up mad he'd go tell his friends we were all Libertarians or something. It took about an hour, but I finally got him to relax a bit. Then he's telling me about how he used to be a dictator on some island in Central America but he got run off by his constituency and all but now he's got a new gig up in Idaho and how'd I like to be the Editor-In-Chief of his newspaper. Well I said yeah, that sounded good to me. Then before you know it, here I am, two years of experience to go on the resume, editing my very own paper. I'll always be grateful for Mr. Skidmore and Planet Venison. He tells me that if we get our circulation out of the state before 2010, he'll give me his autographed photo of, you guessed it, Eldridge Cleaver.