High School, In Outfits

{{This is a re-post.}}

 

I can’t remember much about the person I was in high school. That teen identity sorta fused with the person I am now (frighteningly similar) and the girl-woman I perceived myself to be during that time. I’m quite sure I came across as goofy, overly earnest, and random. I do know I thought a lot about clothes, and concocted the perfect outfits to wear for each auspicious high schooly occasion: football games, late night Denny’s dinners, barn parties. The labels of my day — Esprit. Hunter’s Run. Guess — whirled about my head at night and I still recall the acrid carpety smell of the Vernon Hills Hawthorne Mall fitting rooms.

 

Still, I was a girl of little parental money for clothes, so I often borrowed friend’s outfits and conjured money from babysitting jobs to foot the wardrobe bill. What I couldn’t buy, I cobbled together from my parents’ closet. Oversized sweaters from my dad, inappropriately clingy silk dresses from my mom, pajamas. Thank God for uniforms. But every dress-up Friday, you’d find me in either (a) something I made with paint/bleach/stencils or (b) something horribly off in some glaringly disturbing way. Many times, I wore plastic slippers with my plaid Catholic schoolgirl skirt because I thought they looked like stylish flats, or a flannel pajama top that doubled as an oxford. And? I’m totally serious.

 

I loved bright colors and stripes and patterns and (did I already say bright colors?). Also, I adored juxtaposition, so I’d wear say, oversized sunglasses with a hobo ensemble because no one expects hobos to dress like Madonna from the nose up, am I right?

 

 

(These were my artfully bleached pants.) (And my straw hat.) (No relationship between the two implicit nor implied.)

 

And — I did mention the bright colors, right? Did I talk about the stripes too? ‘Cuz I had big love for both of those design elements.

I don’t think you believe me. So I’ll have to show you.

 

(Just so you know, this is hurting me way more than you):

 

 

(Dad’s sweater. You may recognize the bright color gene?)

 

 

(Were stripes big in the ’80s? That’d make me feel marginally better.)

 

 

(Eyes closed due to nuclear glow given off by shirt.)

 

You know what? I think I’m done here.

 

p.s. Just be glad I’m not posting the Moonlighting script I wrote my senior year.