Monday, April 7, 2008
You Can Take the Girl out of the Valley…
After the arrival of my little sister in mid-1980, likely in order to give my poor mom a much-needed break, I began going on regular trips to the mall with my Dad – the Sherman Oaks Galleria, no less. Like totally. We would stroll about, making sure to stop at the pet store and the ice cream shop, maybe the bookstore. Unbeknownst to my father, I would spend a good deal of the time soaking up the fashion sense of the cool teenagers who dwelled permanently in their mall habitat.
By the time I was five or six, I had absorbed enough that I would make these trips outfitted in a purple striped miniskirt and fringed, suede boots. My thin, brittle hair had gone through several stringy, stinky, perms by the time I was seven-and-a-half. I was born into the Valley, and, from a very young age, I felt an uncontrollable pull to epitomize this hotbed of cutting-edge fashion.
Before I hit double-digits, I was so obsessed with the movie Flashdance, that I would wait until my mom was distracted or on the phone so that my friends and I could sneak off and try to make it to the “forbidden” nude scenes before getting caught. My best friend and I would wrap our dancing feet in masking tape and reenact Jennifer Beals’s sweat-pumping dance montage right along with the grainy VHS tape. Sex and dance and legwarmers were forever, and inextricably, mixed in my young mind.
By the time I was ten and taking modern dance class, I made my mom alter my leotard to have high, French cut, wedgy-producing leg holes; I was sure this made it more stylish and sexy. I wasn’t even out of the sixth grade. (The sixth grade where Sarah and I pretended to be prostitutes to Todd and Ryan’s mock-pimps -- I am not sure I even really understood what a pimp was, but I knew it was fun to walk arm-in-arm with a boy.) The outfit I ultimately wore to my sixth grade graduation was based largely on an outfit I’d seen on a carefree model in a cigarette billboard. It involved a red crinoline and suspenders.
Once I was in junior high, I debated at least weekly with my mother about the appropriateness and length of my skirts. “No, Mom! It is a skirt, not a belt! Really!” I never went so far as to pack extra clothes for school in my white, Esprit bag, but I did roll up my skirt a waistband width or two before entering Mrs. Warnock’s homeroom most mornings.
As I began to get a whiff of ninth grade and a new decade around the corner, I buried my memories of fluorescent fishnet socks and white, rhinestone high-tops. My ponytails got lower, my bangs flatter, and my attitude decidedly more “artsy.” By the time I graduated high school, I think most people would have called me a hippy. I had ditched the neon and the miniskirts for Doc Marten’s and long, drab dresses. I chose black over hot pink and bragged about my recycling habits rather than my lip-gloss collection. The eighties were, most definitely, over
Last month, my friend Emily invited me to her birthday party. Her stylish Evite announced that the theme was, “Fairy Slut Bus.” Yes, Emily planned to make her party a moving experience by packing her scantily clad friends into a party bus and taking us to various clubs around town. Emily is pretty darn cool. I began to contemplate how to interpret the “Fairy Slut” mandate. By the night of the party I had it all figured out; the outfit seemed to put itself together.
Later, looking at pictures of the event, I realized that my inner Valley Girl had come out to dress me for the party. She had expertly paired my high heals with glitter legwarmers and used scissors to alter a watermelon pink top so it hung off one shoulder strategically revealing a teal, sequined bra strap. She made my hair huge with hot rollers, and, like totally, coated my eyes in bold purple and green shadow! In the absence of my mother to object to my inappropriate attire, I chose a fantastically short skort (I’ve developed a little modesty in my old age and thought a skirt might be too much). Thanks to Emily, I got to live the dream of my ten year-old-self. I realized that my inner slut, like totally, dwells in ‘8o’s, and she, is still, like fully, from The Valley. Sorry, Mom.
Labels: dance, rant
tidbit posted by Mosa @ 4:02 PM
