Gracies Dinnertime Theatre(GDT) was a publication written by a group of Rochester Institute of Technology

Rochester Institute of Technology

The Rochester Institute of Technology is a private university, located within the town of Henrietta in metropolitan Rochester, New York, United States...

 (RIT) students that was in production from 1995 to 2005. In its 257 issues, it was notorious for its political incorrectness of race relations, bizarre end-time prophecies, baseless conspiracy theories, provocation of the established student magazine, Reporter, the Clinton

Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

 and Bush

George W. Bush

George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

 administrations and in particular, RIT President Al Simone

Albert J. Simone

Dr. Albert Joseph Simone is a former president of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, USA.Simone earned his Bachelor of Arts from Tufts in 1957, and his PhD from MIT in 1962....

.

Perhaps GDT's greatest single contribution was the article "The Politics of High Tech Damnation," which examined the close, covert links between the CIA and RIT in the early and mid 1990s.

Less controversial content included a weekly chess puzzle

Chess problem

A chess problem, also called a chess composition, is a puzzle set by somebody using chess pieces on a chess board, that presents the solver with a particular task to be achieved. For instance, a position might be given with the instruction that White is to move first, and checkmate Black in two...

 and frank sexual discussion.

GDT's presence on the internet initially began as a text-only finger plan

Finger protocol

In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information.-Name/Finger protocol:...

. By the fall of 1995, GDT had a web site hosted by one of its creators, making it one of the first student satire publications to have a web presence. In time, the hosting of the web site migrated to servers owned by RIT Computer Science House

Computer Science House

Computer Science House is a special interest house founded in 1976 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, made up of a group of students who share an interest in computers, community and having fun. Despite its name, students from all majors are allowed to join...

. Its final resting place came to be on the Hell's Kitchen server.

GDT spawned five sister publications which all published under the combined title of Hell's Kitchen. This was distributed for free on four universities in Rochester, NY and Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. Under this combined title, GDT received notable attention from the Independent Press Association, Rochester's daily newspaper The Democrat and Chronicle, and had a few articles reproduced via UWIRE.

Despite the sometimes antagonistic relationship between GDT and the administration of RIT, RIT chose to recognize GDT's commitment to improving the college in 2008 by commissioning a 24 foot reproduction of GDT's logo. Created by Juan Carlos Caballero-Perez and Leonard Urso, the silver stainless steel piece named Unity is installed in the quad between the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, the College of Applied Science and Technology, and the College of Engineering.

Intentional Misspellings in Title

• "Gracies" would appear to be a possessive pronoun referring to RIT's Grace Watson Dining Hall (colloquially "Gracie's"). Used without the apostrophe, "Gracies" may be read as plural, suggesting a multiverse
  Multiverse
  The multiverse is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise all of reality.Multiverse may also refer to:-In fiction:* Multiverse , the fictional multiverse used by DC Comics...
  
   of parallel dining halls.
• "Dinnertime Theatre" may recall a formal Dinner theater
  Dinner theater
  Dinner theater is a form of entertainment that combines a restaurant meal with a staged play or musical. Sometimes the play is incidental entertainment, secondary to the meal, in the style of a sophisticated night club, or the play may be a major production with dinner less important, or in some...
  
   production, or it may simply denote theatre
  Theatre
  Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
  
  that occurs coincidental to meal without the willing participation of the diners. Socialization based around the sharing of "food" (not only physical nutrition, but also information) is a recurring theme in GDT production culture.
• "Theatre" uses the British English spelling; another frequently-used affectation in GDT articles.

External links

• Gracies Dinnertime Theatre homepage, with complete archive.
• Reproduction of Democrat and Chronicle article on Hell's Kitchen.
• Reproduction of Independent Press Association article on Hell's Kitchen.
• UWIRE affiliate list.
• Politics of High Tech Damnation, by Ali Zaidi .