In 1998, I joined a weekly publication project started by a group of Rochester Institute of Technology students. I was with them for about two years, doing layout, writing some articles, joining in on the brainstorm sessions for their main article, and folding – so much folding.
In February 2025, after almost two decades of dormancy, I was asked to write a piece for a 30th anniversary issue, so I did. The cover features the Unity statue, erected at RIT in 2011, which suspiciously looks like GDT’s logo.
The reaction was intense. When it was started thirty years ago, it was a couple pages long and took months for the publishers to get any support or even positive recognition, but now, after a few months in secret preparations, it appears suddenly — fully formed, and weighing in at thirty-six pages — to a chorus of astonished disbelief that this campus lore of near-mythological levels has returned, and many new readers contacted them enthusiastically. With someone in a group chat making a simple suggestion that “we have an opportunity to do the funniest thing ever,” and these modern tools of collaboration, it was relatively easy, and brilliantly lucky, to find current students to voluntarily pick up the baton, and to the surprise of the rest of the student body, it has resumed weekly publication.*
Issues available at: Gracies Dinnertime Theatre website
in 2024, the creators of GDT gave an interview as part of the RITIceberg Project.
* Whenever someone writes for or about GDT, or even just mentions it, it’s customary to use ridiculously long sentences**
** And at least one footnote.