When I arrived at my new Middle School, I had a fresh perm courtesy of Goggy and braces. It was mandatory to wear our dress uniforms on the first day, a white, short-sleeved shirt dress with the school’s initials embroidered in dark green on the breast pocket. The matching belt was required for everyone except seniors who, as one of their Senior Privileges, could wear any belt they liked.
This white uniform along with a blue, pinstriped jumper made up my new school wardrobe. My mom and I attended the Used Uniform Sale before the start of school. They were doing a brisk business. Racks and racks of jumpers and shirt dresses in all the pastel, pinstriped colors were crammed into a room off of the main hallway of one of the original buildings on campus. The ‘store’ doubled as a changing room. It reminded me of accompanying my mom to Loehmann’s in Palm Springs, except this time I was meant to be doing the trying on.
The thought of removing any clothing, even my shoes amidst this bunch of feverish moms and obedient daughters was out of the question. I did my best, holding up the couple of uniforms we had managed to grab off the rack, to see if they were a fit. My best guess was yes. Plus, I could not wait to get out of there.
As soon as we got home, I put the yellow and brown jumpers in the washing machine. (A quick aside here, who thought a brown pinstriped jumper was a good look?!) I was determined to wash away the musty smell stuck in my nose. Turns out the smell was from the school building. I would learn this later when the very same hallway would become the main artery of my days, leading to most of my classes and the library.
The uniforms were almost dry. I kept checking the timer. I was anxious to try them on. Finally, the dryer’s buzzer went off. I opened the door and was accosted by a smell worse than the musty hallway. My two ‘new’ uniforms smelled like the inside of a gym locker and its contents, after being forgotten all summer.
Undeterred by hot metal zippers and the smell of old gym socks, I tried on the jumpers. The length was good, not too short as to draw attention to yourself from teachers looking to enforce the dress code and not too long as to elicit whispers from your new classmates. The waist had been taken in to give some definition to the normally, gunny sack shape. I could live with that. However once I turned around and looked in the mirror, it was clear the previous owner and I had very different body types. Suffice it to say, I could have been the fit model for the gunny sack.
The good news is that even as a lowly middle schooler, you could wear any color sweater over your uniforms which meant that as soon as the weather got cooler I could camouflage my limited wardrobe. Alternating between my white dress and blue jumper along with a regulation gray skirt, I enjoyed the simplicity of getting ready in the morning.
In truth, it was the ‘Free Dress’ days that delivered their own special brand of torture.