articles

In the Spotlight (Part Two)

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ 1 Comment

Probably the most extensive print article done about us was the cover feature for USA Weekend, a magazine distributed in many Sunday papers at the time (though our local ones carried Parade instead).

The article was good, but we didn’t care for the pictures they ran with it

Okay, we hated those pictures. Especially that cover photo, which we loathed with a passion that only teenage girls can muster for lousy photos of themselves.

Thirteen’s commentary:

Amy’s hair was, like, standing up and Sarah’s hair was blown around, and mine looked all stringy. Besides, Amy had her mouth wide open, and the sun was, like, glinting off my forehead . . . And then, in the black-and-white one showing us at lunch, you couldn’t even see Sarah, I looked like Kathy Bates from Misery, and all you could see of Amy was her hair (from the back, of course).

(Granted, just the day before she’d written…)

We’ve gotten used to seeing pictures of us and stuff. Before, we would have cringed to even glance at a photo of us. But now we’re used to it. Same with seeing ourselves on TV, hearing our voices, and seeing our names and stuff about us in print. It’s kind of fun, really. (not)

USA Weekend cover feature

Three other newspaper articles from the second wave of publicity, leading up to the episode’s premiere in November 1991:

The Sunday News Leader (Staunton, VA)

Daily Press (Hampton Roads, VA)

Roanoke Times & World-News (Roanoke, VA)

 

In the Spotlight (Part One)

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ 1 Comment

And then word got out.

Here’s a sampling of some of our print interviews. (I should note that to this day, there are still resources online that get Sarah’s last name wrong — early on, a typo morphed it into “Creek” instead of “Creef,” and unfortunately it got copied along from there.)

PDF of articles from local newspapers

(The irony of a Warner Bros.-related story showing up in a Disney magazine was not lost on me.)

Once the story hit the wire services, it was picked up everywhere. We were sent clippings and copies from newspapers across the US (including Hawaii, of course), from The Stars and Stripes, and even from other countries. Interviews became commonplace (if a little boring sometimes because of having to answer the same questions over and over again).

The only story that never panned out was for TIME. They came and did an interview and a fun photo shoot (even to the point of buying us color-coordinated sweatshirts to wear in the photos), but the week the article was slated to appear, Operation Desert Shield became Desert Storm, and from what we understood, our story kept getting pushed back because of all the Gulf War-related news taking up page space. We kept checking each issue for weeks, but to our knowledge, the article never appeared.