Fashion Backward?

When did it happen? I've never been somebody who follows fashion religiously, though Project Runway did reform me to some extent. I like what I wear, but I don't pore over magazines to double-check my trendiness, hip factor, or label compliance. So I was a little taken back when, on a sunny morning at the supermarket, a parade of teens wandered through the cross-walk and took me back 25 years.

Woah. Were those... um... peg leg jeans? Uh... was that a pair of um... Chuck
Taylors?

Holy craptastick flashbacks, Batman... it was!

I'm not really clear about when it happened but the fashions of the 80s have made a huge come-back. Now, let me be clear... not all fashions of the 80s should be going anywhere. They belong in the vault with Don Johnson's career. Seriously.

But there were some fun things, too. Like the peg leg jeans with moccasin boots, and Chuck Taylor sneakers with anything from blazers to grungy band t-shirts. And there was less of a focus on labels and more on the look, which was a great equalizer in my home town. Preppy existed but not that many people wore it. Flash was around, but not that many people were doing the crazt hair colors and cuts yet.

Present company excluded, I'm afraid. I had a super short cut with a tail in shocking maroon glow. Honest. Had hair to my butt one day and shaved it out the next, tinting it with beet juice. I smelled like a salad and looked like an idiot.

Hey, it could have been worse. It could have been...

LEG WARMERS!

Yeah, we did those, too. Flashdance and all that. What a feeling. We tore our sweatshirts, wore leggings with flat slippers, put glitter on virtually everything, and felt daring.

Hey, we were young. We belonged to the night. We belonged to the darkness.

Wait... wrong pop reference. Never mind.

Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense

When I was a student at Marshfield High (my stay there was not chronologically identical to those of my classmates, but I was there) I ended up in in-house suspension on my birthday. In-house was was more or less a cross between jail and silent study. Teachers rotated through the day. You had to be escorted to the bathroom, just outside the classroom, and escorted back inside. It was long and boring.

But this was my birthday and my then-boyfriend (heya Timmy!! 'sup, man?) came to the window on one of the cooler teacher's shifts and asked if he could purleeeeaze give me a gift. (Timmy had traveled all the way from Duxbury, one town over, and was probably skipping school, since he went to Archbishop Williams, several towns north.) Teach relented; Timmy passed me a small box; I opened it to find a Hostess Cupcake with a candle and file in it.

Ok, it was a nail file. But the Jimmy Cagney movie (Google it, kids) reference was cute.

Teacher told us, point blank, that he was not amused and that he had a very low tolerance for nonsense.

Today he would be a paragon of patience, I guess. Because across the country school systems are adopting the ridiculous policy of "No Tolerance." That means, as most of us know, that if you break one of the big rules you're out, no questions, no second chances.

Really? This is a policy schools adopt? Errr... and brag about?

I was a teacher for a while, too. Personally, I think tolerance was among the most important lessons I had to deliver, even though the subjects assigned to me by the administration were English, Psychology, and Journalism. I even had a kid in one of my classes who had been moved from AP English to a lower level with many of the Special Ed and remedial kids. When I asked why, I was told it was punishment for bad behavior.

Yeah. I almost wigged, too. My last act before leaving was making sure he went back where he belonged the following year. Academic punishment for behavioral problems? (By the way, I never had a lick of trouble from him.)

Anyway, back to Zero Tolerance.

I find it fascinating that schools these days want to stick their noses into the private lives of their students-- perusing MySpace pages, alerting police to parties, telling them how to dress and wear their hair-- but have the nerve to institute a policy that completely cripples the ability of young adults to learn the skills they need to make those choices wisely for themselves.

Tolerance and acceptance and understanding work together. Tolerance allows us to bend and change so that we can make it to acceptance and growth. Tolerance is the magic bullet that lets a kid raised by racists learn to deal with people who scare him, then learn to let the fear go, then learn to reject the stupidity ingrained in him or her by others. Tolerance is the mechanism through which a Catholic kid works side by side with a Muslim kid without getting into religious arguments. It's not important that they disagree; they tolerate (and hopefully, after a lot of tolerance, embrace) one another.

Kids need tolerance. All of us do. A school system without it is a system crippled, mangled, and harmful.

And I can promise you there won't be any file-stuffed cupcakes! So what's the point, really?