The VTB Edition

Please welcome the Very Talented Blogger (VTB) Mom-in-a-Million.

This VTB has tackled Heidi Montag (who deserved a good tackling), became bffs with Tori Spelling and even wrote her own Twilight saga for my amusement. Well, not just for my amusement but it sure felt like it.

But, to change it up, she also writes letters to Michelle Obama. Great, thoughtful ones.

Check her out: she's fantastic, she's incomparable, she's truly Mom-in-a-Million.
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When The KLZ* asked me to guest post I was psyched because her blog cracks me up on a regular basis, especially the stuff she writes about her own younger years and the effect her antics had on her parents. I can only draw one conclusion from her blog: she’s cool, has always been cool, and has somehow retained her coolness into adulthood. I, on the other hand, WAS cool once upon a time, though I have long since left my coolness behind. But the KLZ inspired me to recount a little about my cooler years. Or, as you’ll read, my colder years.


*Why am I calling her The KLZ instead of just plain KLZ? I don’t know. I just thought it sounded cool.



As any faithful reader of my blog has learned by now, I’m not cool. My clothes aren’t cool, my hair isn’t cool, my taste in music and tv isn’t cool and I haven’t been in a movie theatre since 2008. I’m on the fast track to being named the Least Cool Mom of The Year and I have no doubt that, any minute, my child is going to start asking me to drop him off a block away from daycare so he can walk in alone and be spared being seen in my uncool presence.

It wasn’t always like this though. Once upon a time, I was, if not cool, at least avante garde and non-conformist is a way that deliberately skirted cool. And became a little cool in the process.

Confused? OK, let me explain.

I emerged from a dorky childhood and painful middle school years when I was 15 by shedding my glasses and braces and donning a thick layer of red lipstick. Naturally inclined toward the arts, I found my spiritual home in the office of my high school literary magazine where I became fast friends with people who looked more like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club than Molly Ringwald. And it was good. Real good. (The poetry I churned out in those days was not good but that’s another story for another time).

We were all a group of creative free-spirits – or spirits who yearned to be perceived as free even though we still had curfews – and our appearances were often our chosen medium for displaying our creativity and the tortured state of our angst-ridden teen-age souls. I swear I am not making it up when I say that when the black-wearing editor of the literary magazine was asked by a non-literary magazine person why he always wore black, he actually quoted the Smiths and said “I wear black on the outside because black is what I feel on the inside.”

Needless to say, I had a HUGE crush on him.

Someone in our elite little crowd must have been somewhat eco-conscious even in those early days before the greening of everything in sight because we were all fond of natural fiber clothing purchased at several non-chain stores in a hip area we frequented. It was not unusual to see a group of us touching up our heavy eye-liner in a café that served falafel before falafel was cool. We liked it there because it was Kosher (a close friend was Orthodox) and served lots of vegetarian fare (you probably already guessed that about half of us were vegetarians, hadn’t you?). After our falafel breaks, we would buy crystal pendants and shoulder bags made in Guatemalan villages and then head to a record store to buy cassettes of Jane’s Addiction. The Cure, and Nine Inch Nails, then maybe take in Barton Fink or My Own Private Idaho at a local art house movie theatre.

I didn’t color my hair in those days but my friends were well versed in the use of Kool-Aid to add color (a knitting enthusiast also dyed yarn with Kool-aid. Yes, we knitted before knitting was cool). Or, even better, Manic Panic dye. My thing was the lipstick. Red lipstick. And black eye-liner and white powder. Oh yeah. I wasn’t full on Goth because of my fondness for red tartan and the occasional appearance of a totally mainstream late 80’s floral print dress at like, our senior banquet, but my look usually trended toward Morticia Addams.

Let me describe what I might have worn on an ordinary day in high school: an oversized black mock turtleneck; a short, flippy, natural fiber skirt; thigh-high tights with a garter belt; red or black Chinese slippers, which were essentially fabric mary-janes with a thin plastic sole; a long lightweight trench coat while outdoors; and the aforementioned make-up.

I know. Compared to what 16 year olds wear today, that’s pretty tame, garter hose notwithstanding. You’re wondering where the punchline to all of that is. Oh, it’s good. I wore this in Rochester, NY. In the middle of winter. And I walked to school. In my cloth and plastic shoes, with my nether-regions left unprotected by the garter-hose-short-skirt combo. I wore underwear but it was no match for the Rochester winds and my feet were usually soaked by the slush that my friend K and I walked through as we trudged the streets rather than walking on the plowed sidewalks.

Cool? Ice freaking cold.

As time went on, I would venture into the world of tattoos and piercings way up in the cartilage of my ears but I would never again be as relentlessly expressive with my clothes, make-up and hair as I was in high school. If you looked at me today, you probably wouldn’t be able to see the semi-Goth girl beneath the surface of my function-first work wardrobe that’s selected to draw attention to my brains and competence. And there’s pretty much no chance in hell that I’d walk through snow in cotton shoes at this point in my life. But I’m glad I did all of that because it means I’ll know to back away when my son decides he’s the second coming of Kurt Cobain and dresses in Docs and flannels (I’m hoping that’s what will be cool again when he’s in high school) and refuses to put on a real winter coat. He’ll need his moment to freeze his ass off in pursuit of cool. Meanwhile, I’ll pull on a pair of heavy socks when the weather gets cold because I’m more interested in warmth than cool now.