Ah, the first day of school. The anticipation, the anxiety, the new book bags and trapper keepers and pencil boxes. I remember staying up late to make sure the laces on my Bass shoes were perfectly coiled — I wouldn’t want to be embarrassed by not staying in the latest trend. It was the one day of the year where my uniform shirt was ironed, my plaid skirt was actually clean — yep, I wore a uniform from first to ninth grade and loved every minute of it. Most kids complained heartily about wearing a uniform and did everything they could to stretch the limitations, but I absolutely loved it. I never had to wake up and think about what I was going to wear to school and fashion was never something I became interested in. My sister hated wearing the same thing and became completely obsessed with fashion, her out-of-school outfits bordered on the ridiculous but they were totally on trend and she would have fit in perfectly with Barbie on the beaches of Malibu.
I, on the other hand, was very happy with my plaid skirt, white button down shirt and green sweater. In fact, there are days when I look at my outfit and realize that I am wearing a white shirt with a green sweater. Ten years in the same uniform obviously left its marquee on my psyche.
There is an interesting thing about uniforms. Although we all looked similar from a distance, if you really looked at us you could see our individuality peeking through. One girl could never wear socks the required colors of dark green or white and was somehow able to get away with increasingly outrageous colors and patterns. I think our headmistress actually enjoyed the vibrancy of her character and chose not to limit her creativity — or to discourage her learning to protest through silent and small means.
That’s what my class learned in school. I think it was around 7th grade that we all started wearing crazy patterned men’s boxers underneath our skirts. It made sense to want to increase the coverage of our lady parts so we could do cartwheels and swing on the monkey bars without exposing ourselves to the world. But the brightly colored boxers led to shorter skirts. And that’s where the problem came in.
You see, uniform skirts are required to be a certain length. We never had to stand in front of the headmistress and measure to the tips of our fingertips, but we still had to look nice. But that’s not how uniformed girls wanted to look in the late 1980s. We wanted to be grunge. We wanted to wear flannels tied around our waists and short, funky skirts with maybe a studded leather belt. But we settled for rolling our skirts just short enough that you could see our funky boxers sticking out underneath.
We looked awesome. And ridiculous. And completely out of uniform. While we had looked so adorable in our Peter Pan collars and plaid jumpers only a few short years ago, now we were in full rebellion. We knew our skirt looked ridiculous, but it was driving the headmistress crazy and we loved it. But like all teenage rebellions, we eventually lost. Kind of. Our headmistress was kind enough to compromise with us. She didn’t mind the short skirts, she saw the trend, but she made one fatal mistake: she forbade the rolling and asked us to hem our skirts instead.
Now, the beauty of rolled skirts was that we could look ridiculous out at recess or heading home on the bus, but we could roll them back down for lunch or assembly or an event with parents in attendance. Our parents never knew, because we always looked presentable when they were around. Once we hemmed them, there would be no going back.
The second problem became that none of us asked our parents for help and instead hemmed our own. Have you ever measured a hem on yourself while wearing the item? You bend forward just a bit to get the measurement, make the cuts and fold the seam. Even we knew that we had screwed up. Our skirts were so short that they barely even covered our lady bits and since uniforms could only be ordered in the fall, we spent months wearing skirts that were … well, let’s just say that boxers were now mandatory.
Even now, I feel naked without some kind of shorts underneath my skirts. You can do anything in a skirt when it has shorts underneath it — especially cartwheels!
Merisa Sherman is a long time Killington resident, Town Lister and member of the Development Review Board. She is a global real estate advisor and also Coach PomPom. She can be reached at Merisa.Sherman@SothebysRealty.com.
