Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (6 page)

“Get into the kitchen. Now!” he yelled.

I slumped in, bowl of popcorn in hand.

“I’m only going to say this once,” he said, giving me his angry, two-fingered point. When my father pointed at you with both his index and middle finger, you knew he was serious. “Fourteen-year-old girls are not supposed to wear their fathers’ underwear. I work day and night so you have all those nice clothes in that closet of yours. I see you wear my underwear again, and you’re going to be punished.”

Can you imagine?

“Are you coming to the party this weekend?” a friend would ask. “Can‘t,” I’d have to tell them, “I’m grounded for wearing my father’s underwear.”

So I bought my own boxer shorts, same brand as my dad’s—Hanes—in his size.

“Whose are they?” my dad asked as I walked by, chomping on a Ring Ding.

“They’re mine,” 1 muttered through the chocolate cake and whipped cream center in true teen-angst form as I went into my room and shut the door.

It was around that time that I had my first major crush. Stanley Denton didn’t go to my school; he went to Lower Merion High School. I’d seen him playing at a Harriton vs. Lower Merion soccer game. Soccer was to my neighborhood what I’m assuming football is to other parts of the country. It was the sport to play, and it made celebrities out of the guys who were on the team. You’d get dressed in your best relaxed Levi’s and Koala Blue or ACA Joe sweatshirts that you’d cut the neck wider on so it would slide off your shoulders like Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance,
then you’d sit in the stands and watch the most popular and cutest Harnton boys like Eddie Blume and Robert Weiss kick that ball back and forth from one end of the held to the other, scoring goals, and pretend each point was in your honor.

Julie Pelagatti was dating one of the players on our team, thus giving Amy and me the slick VIP groupie status of getting to go onto the field after the game to congratulate our players. While Julie made out with her boyfriend, Amy and I took the opportunity to scope out some of the other guys up close. Stanley Denton was talking to Robert Weiss, and I went over to say congratulations. As Robert introduced us, I fell into teenage lust. Stanley was sweaty and dirty and wearing the wrong team colors, but his light brown hair was shabby and long, covering his eyes, and he had the coolest gold stud in his ear.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said back.

It was love. I stood there thinking of romantic ideas as I hunched my shoulders in the hope that the side of the ACA Joe sweatshirt would fall over my shoulder.

I couldn’t ask Robert Weiss for the setup; we didn’t have that kind of friendship. Just then, Debbie Ellick and Lori Levin walked up to Stanley and interrupted our deep conversation and, although I walked away, I found my in. I knew that Debbie and Lori were friends with my friend Jennifer Klein, who went to the Friends Central School. If Debbie and Lori were friends with Stanley, then it was a good chance that Jennifer was too.

“Of course I’m good friends with Stanley” Jennifer declared on the phone later that night when I got home. “I was just at Lloyd Bucher’s keg party with him last Saturday night! Why? Do you like him?”

“I think he’s cute.”

“Do you want me to say something?”

“If you want.”

The setup was put into motion. How amazing was it going to be: me, dating a soccer player. Granted, from a rival school, but who cared? I would be a traitor for the man I loved. How romantic:

A couple of days later, I was in my house after school watching
General Hospital
in the family room. I was sitting there with a box of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter, dipping my finger into the jar and spreading the contents onto my cracker when the doorbell rang.

In retrospect, I should have asked who it was at the door. In retrospect, I should have been doing my Jane Fonda Workout tape instead of eating butter crackers and peanut butter in the middle of the afternoon. In retrospect, I should have been doing a lot of other things, but most of all, in retrospect, I should not have been wearing boxer shorts that were three sizes too big with the Betsey Johnson multicolored neon-orange, pink, and lime patchwork cropped sweater I’d worn to school that day when I opened the door to try to lure Stanley Denton into my life.

“Did we catch you at a bad time?” Jennifer asked as I stood in the doorway with peanut-butter-soiled fingers.

“No,” I hastily replied, “come on in.” In retrospect, I should have said, “Yes,” and slammed the door on them.

“This is Stan,” Jennifer announced as they walked in.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said staring down at my shorts.

We walked back into the family room, and I sat there as composed as I possibly could, sneaking licks of my fingers to get the peanut butter out of my fingernails. I sat on the edge of the couch, crossing my legs and sitting up as straight as I could. Stanley was even more gorgeous clean than he was on the soccer field. He had these piercing blue eyes that could have been mistaken for being colored contacts. I got the chance to get a peek every time he moved the hair out of his eyes.

“Crackers?” I offered, handing him the box.

“Got a game in a little,” he said, looking over at the television watching Luke Spencer duke it out with one of the Cassadines. “Actually,” he said, looking over at Jennifer, “we really can’t stay long.”

My heart dropped.

“We just came over to say hi,” Jennifer said. “We were passing your house, so I thought we’d stop,” she lied.

Two minutes later, they were gone. An hour later, Jennifer called me.

“Were you wearing your father’s underwear?” she screamed into the phone.

“No, it’s my own,” I told her.

“Why were you wearing boxer shorts? He thought you were a weirdo!”

“Well, why did you come over without calling first?”

“Because I didn’t expect you to be wearing your father’s underwear!”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘She’s a chubby weirdo!’ Who wears their father’s underwear?”

Teenage girls can be so vicious with the truth, can’t they? Jennifer, though, was one of my best friends, and for that reason had a right to tell me the truth. In return, a couple of years later, I told her the truth when she asked me what I really thought of her nose job.

“He’s actually dating Robin Zinman,” she lied.

“OK,” I told her nonchalantly.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t care,” I told her as I hung up the phone.

I threw off the boxer shorts and put on some regular shorts, then shoved the Jane Fonda Workout tape into the VCR.

A few weeks later, Laner confused my boxer shorts with my dad’s boxer shorts and put them in his drawer. When I saw my dad wearing my underwear, I didn’t bother saying anything. I could have teased him and said, “What father wears his daughter’s underwear?” But he wouldn’t have thought that was funny. I would never wear boxer shorts again, even when the craze hit the sorority circuit across America. It was like Einstein regretting having helped invent the atomic bomb.

Every now and then as the years go by, I’ll be out with my parents at the beach or on a hot summer day, and lo and behold, there’s some girl wearing a GAMMA GIRLS KICK BUTT! pair of boxer shorts. I’m telling you now, I could win the Nobel Peace Prize and when reporters ask my parents how they feel, I’ll bet you anything they’ll say, “We’re proud about this, but did you know that our daughter was the first young girl to wear boxer shorts?”

“Look, Dean. She’s wearing boxer shorts, and you started that!” my mother will shout with glee, pointing at the college coed.

“That’s right, you did,” my dad will proudly say. “Remember how she used to steal my underwear, Arlene?”

“I sure do,” Arlene will say boastfully

“Who knew she was such a trendsetter?” my father will announce.

I want to tell them both to shut up, but I really don’t have the right. I mean, let’s face the facts: I
did
start the trend. Proud as they could be, smiles bright and fulfilled, my parents will stand there and watch in awe at the contribution their daughter added to this world until the sorority girl has turned a corner and left their sight.

“Who knew?” my dad will say with a sigh.

“It’s really something,” my mother will agree.

Years later, I did eventually end up dating Stanley Denton.

“Why were you wearing your father’s underwear?” he teased.

“Teenage angst,” I told him.

s the start of the tenth grade rolled around, my body had started to “wean out the baby fat,” as my mother put it. I was sitting at home watching MTV in my fifteenth year of life when a woman came on the screen who changed my outlook on fashion forever.

Teased blond hair wrapped in what seemed to be the bottom ribbing of the half sweatshirt she was wearing. Long pearls snapped against her shiny BOY TOY belt buckle as she shimmied back and forth. She wore a short black crinoline skirt over a pair of biking shorts and black boots. In short, she was awe-inspiring, and the whole thing was giving me the shivers. In the two minutes that I watched the video, she spoke to me as being exactly who I wanted to be. She was cutting edge, sexy, playful, feminine yet one of the guys, tough, independent, and radical all rolled into one. I had to look exactly like her. I needed to be her twin, and thank my lucky star, I kind of looked like her already ... at least I thought so. When I asked Amy Chaikin about this possible switched-at-birth phenomenon, she said as tenderly as she could, “Well, you both have blond hair.”

The most important thing was this: I had to get this look down before anyone else found out about her. Chances were, no other girl at school would have seen the magnificence like I did. No one in suburban Philadelphia had the keen fashion eye that I did and could pick up on this singer’s obvious up-to-the-minute air of aptness. As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror showering half a bottle of my mother’s V05 hairspray onto my head and teasing the matted locks with my brother’s comb, I thought to myself,
If anyone accuses me of copying, I’ll deny it to the end.

“You look like that singer on MTV!” Greg Garron shouted the second I walked into homeroom that Monday morning.

“What are you talking about?” I asked with the straightest look I could manage as I nervously scratched my face. I immediately regretted it since I might have smudged the fake mole I’d created from mascara that morning.

“You do! You do! You look like Madonna!” Debbie Franklin joined in.

“Who is Madonna?” I asked nervously as I fiddled with the silver bracelets I’d spent all Sunday night creating out of some silver wire from the hardware store.

“That singer,” Debbie said, “on MTV”

“I don’t have MTV,” I lied as I ran my hands through my teased coif and straightened the do-rag tied around it.

As I sat in my seat and listened to that morning’s roll call, I could feel the eyes of my peers upon me like vultures circling my combination chair/desk, getting ready to attack at any moment. How could they have all found out about her in one weekend?

“Adena Halpern?” Ms. Greaser, the homeroom teacher, asked taking roll call.

“You mean Madena?” Greg Garron snickered.

The crowd went into hysterics. I was mortified.

I went into the bathroom before first period and wiped the faux mole off my face. Maybe it was a little too much.

It was my first lesson in perpetrating a look: Never go for the entire look head-on, just go for little nuances of it.

The next day I arrived in class, my hair was still disheveled, since that was the part I liked the best, but I eighty-sixed the mole, the wire bracelets (which were poking into my skin anyway and I was afraid they would slit my wrists), and I wore a pair of Girbaud neon-orange parachute pants with my blue-and-white-striped Vans sneakers. I knew I looked like the bastard child of Madonna and Bozo the Clown, but I was my own person, not a carbon copy of someone else.

I’ve seen Madonna through almost every stage of her material life. When Madonna cut the do-rag and went like a virgin, I was enthralled. Not only was I like a virgin, I was a virgin, and the bustier I found at Screaming Mimi’s gave me the figure that would soon make me otherwise. When she affixed a long faux ponytail and played Truth or Dare, I took the dare and sadly got that ponytail stuck in some subway doors. The last I saw of my faux mane, it was kind of waving good-bye as it flapped in the wind when the subway took off and made its way toward Grand Central Station.

I did skip the geisha look, and when Madonna came out with the sex book, I skipped that look too.

These days, Madonna has been more apt to wear tailored suits, which really aren’t my thing, so I’ve sort of broken off from her, but I’m always on the lookout for her new styles. Just last week I saw this paparazzi photo of her coming off a plane in a multicolored orange, green, and yellow three-quarter-sleeve sweater matched with an orange scarf. I’ve been looking everywhere, but I can’t seem to find anything that looks remotely like it. If you see something like it, could you call me?

Madonna is, was, and will always be the queen bee to my wannabe.

knew exactly what I wanted to wear for my senior prom, and nothing was going to stop me. What I wanted was very simple: a black strapless top with a knee-length crinoline poufy bottom. In the late eighties, with Madonna and Cyndi Lauper as our teenage fashion idols, how hard was that going to be to find?

Amy Chaikin already had her prom dress: a feminine white strapless, tight-lace, floor-length gown that she’d matched with some white gloves and a white sash she’d tied around her neck. When I started on the quest with Julie Pelagatti, the first dress she tried on was the one she got: a gold lamé strapless that sprouted hoards of stiff fabric in shades of gold and white on the bottom of the floor-length gown, making her look like a gold mermaid. Personally, I didn’t like the dress, but conceeded the point when Julie said, “I want my prom dress to reflect who I was in my senior year of high school.” Looking back, both dresses reflected who my friends were at the time. For Amy it was her ethereal nature, always looking on the bright side of everything. For Julie, her dress was a shining example of someone who was nothing like everyone else and didn’t care what anyone else thought. I, on the other hand, wanted to look like everyone else, but with a bit of myself thrown in for good measure. That’s why I thought my idea of the black strapless with the crinoline was perfect.