A Bushel of Laughs

When I changed what I looked for from others.

The metaphor:

On Friday, I went with Steve to an evening event with his coworkers. It was fun and trippy to meet the people he spends his days with, but hard to remember how to dress to see colleagues in real life.

I’ve been working remotely for more than five years, and on the time or two each year I have to wear business clothes, I feel like I’m reinventing how to dress. I wondered if wearing a blazer would feel too formal, so put on lipstick instead: the blazer of the face?

That feeling of calculating how my clothes would be received by others reminded me of past autumn days when I learned about clothes as a kid. I thought about what I wore before I cared about clothes and why I started caring – how a school skit showed me that my high school outfits were little performances, too.

The story:

I wore a very vibrant outfit to my friend’s 10th birthday party. I know because there’s a picture of 9-year-old me in the apple picking orchard, dressed as brightly as the fruit.

As usual, my mom had picked those clothes: a magenta tunic top with a big ruffle at the waist and red leggings covered in little blue flowers. It was October 1995: I’d just started fourth grade, and wouldn’t care about clothes for at least another year. What I really wanted was to make people laugh, and on that day, I was doing it.

In the picture, I’ve tucked the ruffled shirt edge into my pants and shoved at least eight apples down the neck, giving myself a lumpy potbelly. There’s an apple in each of my pant legs for good measure, like a bulbous second knee in the middle of each thigh. It’s not a sophisticated gag, but my wide grin is showing all my pre-braces teeth, so it must’ve worked: somebody must be laughing.

I was generally quick to give up my dignity for a shot at being funny as a kid. I remember being at a friend’s house and discovering her coffee table was made out of a small barrel, which had an open bottom and empty middle. I put it on my head and danced around the room. I loved the silly antics of Timon and Pumbaa in the Lion King. I learned to observe situations and improvise what others might be thinking. I’d see a car stopped in the road for a deer crossing and imagine what the animal was doing there. “He’s like, Pay the toll, Susan!” I learned early on that throwing in a random name makes it funnier.

Five years after I filled my outfit with apples, I was a sophomore in high school, collecting corny pickup lines. “Are you a parking ticket? Because you’ve got ‘fine’ written all over you.” I wasn’t trying to use them, just delighting in their wordplay. I never got into “that’s what she said,” but became devoted to two similar tropes, pointing out lines of conversation that would make a good band name or memoir title. I loved listening with one ear out for a turn of phrase that would fit either scenario, then jumping in to point it out. (Okay, I still love this.)

But by then, I was spending more energy making outfits than making jokes: not for flair and vibrancy, the way my mom had chosen clothes, but calculating what would go over best among my peers. I was lucky to be able to afford the early aughts trends at my public school. My parents gave me a clothing allowance which I used to buy low-rise flared jeans and branded shirts in tight fabric, thin as single-ply toilet paper. My accessories were necklaces of hemp or puka shells, overplucked eyebrows and vocal fry.

I was hustling hard, and it worked, to a degree. I stopped getting teased and started getting asked out. I wasn’t Homecoming Queen, but I shyly participated in some of the homecoming events in the competition between grades each fall: practicing a choreographed dance in a field with the other girls in my grade, pushing tissues into the chicken-wire frame of our class float in someone’s driveway. It was fun to feel our class unify through the competition, to wear the swag we ordered or made ourselves, puffy paint and rhinestones on white Hanes multi-packs of t-shirts and tank tops.

My clearest Homecoming memory is complicated, though. I was watching a skit performed by the boys in my grade. I don’t know if it was required that only girls dance and only boys do a skit, or if it was just tradition, but that’s how it happened in the early aughts. The girls would take the floor and move in unison to Outkast or Jennifer Lopez, then boys would make jokes. The sketches were simple and silly, lots of running around the gym in funny costumes. This particular year, the costumes were simply borrowed clothing from girls in our grade, black leggings and spaghetti strap tank tops like we’d wear at school dances, and the sketch was just an impression of our choreography.

I’m not saying our moves were unimpeachable: they were typically basic and often a little lewd. One year we got disqualified for a moment where each row of girls divided into pairs, one dropping to her knees and the other placing a hand on her partner’s head. It’s not that there were no jokes to be made about our showing. But the joke of this sketch was how ridiculous, how incredibly far-fetched it was, to imagine the boys of our grade doing what it felt like we were required to do.

I remember watching one boy in particular, a popular kid who’d still always seemed nice. Usually suave in trendy jeans, he looked awkward and vulnerable in his borrowed leggings, his skinny, knobby-kneed legs on display. He was smiling good-humoredly, and I knew other girls were smiling back, laughing at the charade. I was confused to be on the outside of this dynamic, to feel a burning sensation in my stomach and my breath caught in my lungs. He was not only exempt from the preening performance that felt obligatory to me, he was free of it completely. It was so irrelevant to him that the idea of his voluntary participation was a joke.

My participation in girl culture didn’t feel voluntary either. The clothes I wore, the way I talked, these felt like requirements, the cost of my acceptance. Thinking about it now, I’m sure he had his own set of implicit requirements, ways he felt compelled to perform in the halls of our high school. I’m sure he wasn’t as free as he seemed to me in that moment. It would take a slew of gender studies classes in college for me to understand in my mind what I knew in my gut that day, laid bare by the contrast of my trying to look as attractive to him as I could, and then his pointing out how ridiculous it would be if he did what I felt I had to do.

He was trading his dignity for laughs, and I was burning with jealousy. I felt far from dignified, too, still spending all my energy on what other people thought of me – but I didn’t even get to laugh about it.

The question: What clothes do you remember wearing as a kid and how did you feel about them?

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