School Days and Fashion Notes

For weeks now, the stores have been full of Back to School displays and the big yellow buses are already rolling but when the calendar hits September 1, I am always overwhelmed with memories of the first day of a new school year -- a clean new notebook, a thick pack of blue-lined paper, shiny yellow pencils, an ink pen with those handy cartridges, a ruler, maybe a protractor, and some fat, pink erasers, all zipped snugly into the plastic pouch that fitted inside the three ring notebook.

And maybe a new dress and shoes to start the new school year -- my doting maternal grandparents, with only two grandchildren to spoil, often were the ones to take me shopping for school supplies and by the time I was in high school, those supplies had stretched to include not only a new dress but new lipstick and matching nail polish. ( I can hardly believe it but I can remember kinda lusting after a shade of nail polish called Persian Melon.)

Perfume too -- the names and even the scents come back to me -- Tweed, Wind Song, Jungle Gardenia (a misguided experiment during my senior year of high school that had John rolling down the car window in order to breathe.) And my favorite Maja -- a perfume from Spain, the purchase of which involved a trip to Ybor City -- Tampa's Latin Quarter.

All of these purchases were in pursuit of a new beginning -- new teachers, new classes, new clothes, new me . . . and the giddy expectation that this might be the year Something Wonderful happens.

Of course, soon the notebook was worn and dirty, the pencils chewed on, the erasers hardened and useless. The new outfit would turn out to be not quite what the really popular girls were wearing.

Oh, the conundrum of fashion! It was a password you had to get right. Do you wear your bobby socks rolled or folded down, folded over a foam rubber ring (for that oh so desirable fat sox look,) or do you wear them pulled up . . . or do you not wear socks at all?

It's a wonder I learned anything academic in high school. I was evidently busy studying the changing fashions of the Fifties. Lanz dresses and Capezios defined the so-called nice girls while tight black skirts and shirts with the collars turned up at the back was the uniform of girls who, it was whispered, were not nice, girls who dated the guys known as 'hoods.'

But, oh, the watershed day when one of the cheerleaders came to school, her full skirt hanging limp around her legs, un-poofed by the crinolines that had been de rigueur until that moment.
Heads turned, jaws dropped; it was shocking, it was unbelievable, it was . . . sexy.


By the end of the week, crinolines were a thing of the past -- gone to fashion's scrap bag to join the poodle skirt, the cinch belt, the sack dress . . .