Why is this magazine called MASH? It's a girl thing!

The childhood game MASH goes by many names and has many variations. This is how we know it:

Your friend writes M A S H at the top of the page. This, of course, stands for Mansion Apartment Shack House. Then she asks you the names of four boys you would like to marry, four careers you'd like to have, four cities in which you would like to live, and four cars you'd like to drive. Then, while you look away, she begins to draw a spiral when you give the go ahead. You say stop when the spirit moves you. She will then start at the top of the spiral and count down the number of lines that have been drawn. Using that number, she will start counting at the M in MASH and go all through your choices. Each time she comes to that number (Eight, in the case of our example), she crosses out the choice she has landed on. When there is only one choice left in each section, those are your prophetic answers. 

What is MASH magazine all about?

Here's the Letter from the Editor from our very first issue (September 1999). We think it explains this thing called MASH pretty well.

Dear Readers,

I'm a big magazine reader. Any and every magazine - from Atlantic Monthly to Wired to Vogue to National Geographic. Hell, I even read the articles in Playboy. I'm always looking for a magazine that fits my age group and my taste - a magazine that puts a lot of my interests in one place. But they all seem to fall short, often focusing on things I couldn't care less about.

This is me: I'm 24 and I work an office job that allows me the flexibility to go to school. That's important to me. I'm crazy about smart-but-still-fun movies, I read a lot (books and magazines), I don't have $500 to spend on a pair of shoes. I'm much more interested in becoming the person I dreamt of being as a child. I try to have the courage to believe I can do something risky, creative and adventurous with my life. 

I'm always looking in magazines or surfing the web for what other women like me are doing with their lives. Women dreaming big and just getting started. Does anyone else out there have dreams about having a large and lovely house, a fabulously interesting job and satisfying personal relationships? Are you all having trouble reconciling that with the fact that you have two years left in college before an employer considers you a worthy employee in a mediocre job? 

Do you remember playing that game MASH as a kid? You know ... Mansion Apartment Shack House? You wrote down four names of people you wanted to marry, four places where you wanted to live, four career choices, etc. ... and at that age, with your entire life in front of you and none of the jaded self-doubt you developed later, you dreamt of becoming an architect, a scientist, a movie star, the President. You imagined your home in places like Venice, Paris, New York or Hawaii. And those dreams felt good. For me, it still feels good, but my practical side has problems trying to work out how I can have it all. It doesn't stop me from striving toward it, though, with little steps every day. 

MASH is a step. It's not a step in one direction, it's a step in all directions. And it's for us. 

Kate Murphy, Editor-In-Chief