Jan. 10, 1999
Grand Forks N.D.
Dear classmates and friends,
Remember in the Sixties and early Seventies the fuss some people made when a boy wore his hair long? Many people considered a boy’s hair a scandal if it fell over his ears or the collar of his shirt. The same kind of tsk, tsking was aimed at a girl whose skirts were deemed too short. My mother and I had many a heated discussion about my hemlines. I remember how appalled I was my freshman year because she made my Christmas dress longer than anyone else’s in the Girls Glee Club. It didn’t take long to figure out that wearing a skirt was one way to circumvent mother’s eagle eye. No matter how long the skirt, it could always be rolled up to the desired length once you got to school.
When we were freshman EHS still had a dress code that barred jeans and restricted girls to wearing dresses and skirts. Then those nifty double-knit pants suits came along. Remember them? First the school allowed those and later the dress code crumbled further and jeans were OK too. By the time we were seniors "hot pants" were in and I remember a couple of girls who wore theirs so short it left very little to the imagination.
I went clothes shopping with my teen-ager today. Emily is actually very easy to shop with as we have pretty similar ideas about appropriate clothing. She has never cared about designer labels, so that’s not a problem. However she has become quite specific about certain details. For instance, she won’t wear any pants with a pleated waistline. But that’s pretty minor I think. What’s most distressing to me is her image of her own body. When I was in high school I was a size 16 which I considered way too fat. I dreamed of being a size 10, which in those days the fashion magazines deemed the perfect size. Today my daughter is a size 10, and she considers herself way too fat and dreams of being a size 2 or 4 – or better yet, a size 0! If this trend continues our granddaughters will have to be a negative size 5.
There’s one part of the generation gap concerning dress that hasn’t seemed to change over the years and that’s dressing for cold weather. Mothers never think their daughters are dressed warmly enough. Daughters think mother is overreacting and besides they don’t want to wear anything on their heads because it will mess up their hair. I remember when I was in high school I often stayed overnight in town with my Grandma Beck. She lived on the east edge of town next to the highway so it was a good eight blocks to school. Those were the days when we wore short skirts with turtle-neck sweaters or blouses and matching knee socks. Some mornings it was 30 below and Grandma would beg me to put on some pants under my skirt so I wouldn’t freeze on the way to school. But of course I would rather have died than been seen wearing pants under my skirt. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I guess some things never change. The other morning it was at least 10 below zero when we dropped Emily at Red River High School. From the car in front of us two pretty long-legged blonde girls got out. One was wearing a short skirt with no hose and no socks, just open-toed high-heeled sandals on her bare feet. Both wore unzipped light jackets and neither had a hat, scarf or mittens. They must have been pretty sure they had a warm ride home. Thank goodness for them the school didn’t have a fire drill that day.
Which brings me back to the truth that consoles me on those days when my back aches, my knees make that funny clicking sound and I have just noticed that my hair is grayer than ever. That is, there are good things about being middle-aged. A contest between being fashionable and being warm is no contest at all. I no longer fear "hat head" and I love my long underwear. Let the teeny boppers make the fashion sacrifices – they are welcome to it. I’m feeling pretty good on this side of the generation gap.
Your friend, Paulette