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I’m posting infrequently these days, so I feel compelled to continue sharing my embarrassing old photos.  I want to give you maximum value for your reading time, and I know there’s nothing more fun than laughing at others’ terrible fashion choices. This started as a bad hair series (and, never fear, there is more bad hair to come), but I couldn’t just let these gems lie around in a cardboard box simply because their sins are not confined to hair, now could I?

This ensemble was a hand-me-down from my cousin. I’m quite sure it must have been someone’s 4-H project in the late 1970′s. The cat was attempting to claw its way off my lap, probably in a patchwork-induced seizure.

Did you have spirit week at your junior high? We did. This was punk rock day. I was wearing my mom’s earrings from the 1960s, one set of legwarmers on my legs and another set on my arms, as sleeves. Watch out, Sid Vicious.

I know you’re wondering which person in this picture is me. I’m the one on the right who apparently hasn’t had a haircut in three or four months, who carefully matched her socks to her t-shirt, and who looks suspiciously like a fourth grade boy.

Oh, and I also have my name emblazoned in giant letters across my chest.

If your name happens to be Jennifer or Heather or Stephanie, you might think that shirt is excessive. But if you have a name like mine and you were a youngster before the digital age, you understand why it was HUGELY exciting when my mother came home from shopping in the big city and presented me with a personalized! shirt! It was the very first time I’d ever owned anything with my name pre-printed on it.

Unfortunately the shirt also provides undeniable evidence that that’s really me in those knee-high sweat socks. Why I didn’t take my cues from my best friend (cute, feathered hair; fashionable baseball shirt; form-fitting short shorts; footie socks), I’m not sure. I’ve always been an independent sort.

In fact, as long as we’re talking about how much hair I had, here’s what I looked like when I wore all of it in a bun.

It’s not so much a BAD hair day, but it does look very much like I’ve grown a second skull. I don’t even want to think about the additional weight created by all the bobby pins in there, along with the hole in the Ozone layer created by the Woolworth’s brand aerosol hairspray required to keep it shellacked up like that. Incidentally, I was performing a ballet solo on a flatbed hay truck.

To atone for abandoning you, Internet, I’m going to post a series of photos of my worst ever hair days. This is serious stuff, people. As you’ll soon see, I have difficult-to-manage hair. I’ve always had way too much of it, and it’s coarse and sort of wavy and, well, I’d rather have this hair than be bald but some days I wonder. It’s something I must confess I am still working on today.

Let’s start slowly, with a photo from second grade. My mom and dad went to the state fair and my dad won at the horseraces. They used the money to take me to Disneyland for four days and I got to miss two days of school. It was a Very Big Deal. Such a big deal that we forgot I was missing picture day, the day for which I usually prepared by sleeping in spongy curlers. And then we forgot when re-take day was, and so I was shuffled off unexpectedly to the library and the photographer with his flimsy little dime-store combs.

This was definitely not my Picture Day outfit and it certainly wasn’t my Picture Day hairdo. I vaguely recall that this was taken just after noon recess, when I’d been playing kickball. My mom had recently cut my bangs. Those sad little plastic barrettes are hanging on for dear life. I’m not sure what is going on with that piece of hair that’s longer than everything else. Perhaps I had foreseen the rat tail trend to come? And, in case you’re wondering, most of my childhood winter wardrobe consisted of a turtleneck under something else (in this case, a souvenir t-shirt from the famous Disneyland trip). When I moved out of Montana I practically went into turtleneck withdrawal.

There you go, Internet. The beginning of the end of my dignity. There are perms and mullets and even a prom picture in our future. Away we go.