The following is a public service announcement, courtesy of your long lost friends, the Boyd Sisters. It has come to our attention (via an email from Syl) that our stories might have given some of our readers (mostly Syl’s friends) the “wrong impression.” We would like to reiterate here that Phil and Syl were not “bad parents” and that we did not intend to mislead anyone with our semi-hyperbolic accounts of certain childhood events. While we maintain that all of our stories are true, we do, from time to time, take artistic license with certain facts for comedic effect. Any exaggerations are obvious and intended to be as such. Again, the point of our stories is to make our readers feel better about their childhoods by reading about ours, not to lambaste Phil and Syl for their unconventional parenting techniques. Actually, all of the foregoing applies to the stories we’ve posted thus far. But not this one. Syl is completely responsible for…
my greatest humiliation.
We all have our young crosses to bear. Some of us were chubby (Josh and Jemina). Others were ugly (James and I). Still others were shy and socially awkward (Me again). This is the story of my single greatest source of childhood humiliation. The skeleton I have shoved so far back into my proverbial closet—the one that both Syl and I both feared would one day see the light of day. (Insert loud SIGH here).
Culottes. To the untrained eye, I (the unfortunate gangly he/she youth in the picture with the adult-sized glasses and makeshift bowl cut) might appear to be wearing a black skirt. In the much overused words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friends!”
The word “culotte” is French in origin and is defined as “a garment having a divided skirt.” While many of our finest fashion trends originated with the French, the culotte has to be one of the most enduring blemishes on the face of French fashion. What must have originated on the farms and in the wineries as a practical means of adapting to manual labor and making the cheese growing, goat milking, and grape stomping a little less cumbersome, however, was misappropriated and revived by fundamentalist protestants in the 20th century as a conservative alternative to its evil and immodest counterpart: pants. Yes, pants.
I don’t really remember putting on my first pair of culottes. Photographic evidence suggests Syl surreptitiously swapped my brother’s hand-me-down pants for culottes when I was between the ages of four (4) and six (6). Being a somewhat observant child, I first began to question said substitution in kindergarten when, during the frigid Rochester winter temperatures, Syl insisted that I put on a pair of sweatpants, and then cover said sweatpants with a pair of culottes.
“Why?” I signed to Syl.
“Because it’s modest,” Syl explained matter-of-factly.“What does that mean?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“It means that your body is covered so boys won’t look at you in the wrong way.”I suppose I should have been flattered by Syl’s maternal instincts but, as you can see from this picture, such instincts were a little off as I was not in any danger of getting positive attention from my male peers. I accepted my mother’s explanation that night and waddled out the back door of our house, through the snow, and joined my siblings as they clambered up into our fifteen-passenger Ford van.
Some time later, presumably because her secret hand-me-down supplier of dated women’s fashions did not share her pants-free worldview, Syl decided to commission a seamstress friend of hers to fashion custom-made culottes for me. Having rarely felt the crisp, cool stiffness of store-bought clothing, I viewed the ensuing trip to JoAnn Fabrics to be an acceptable compromise between the garbage sacks filled with used clothing that reeked of mothballs and the pipe dream of store-bought clothing with actual price tags. Once we entered the store, Syl selected three rolls of fabric: one blue, one black, and one gray. She asked me if I liked those colors and, after a glance through my smudged glasses I stated, “No, they’re boring.” Syl then tried to reason with me, explaining that these fabrics, once made into culottes, would “match with everything.” I was unimpressed. Nonetheless, lacking intellectual capacity at the age of seven to argue with that logic, all I could do was mutter “then why am I here?” under my breath, careful to avoid Syl’s piercing gaze so as to not have to lie about what I said. Syl paused a moment, no doubt mentally calculating her planned purcha
ses before telling me that I could choose a pattern of my own. I brightened at this gesture of kindness, and strolled up and down each aisle, peering through my glasses and down my nose at each pattern, running my fingers along the material, mentally discounting them as I went along as being “too fancy,” “too adult,” “too scratchy,” or worst of all, “
too girly.” I rounded the corner to make my way up the final aisle when the proverbial clouds parted and I saw it: a brilliant red Hawaiian print with an interlocking floral pattern and every color of the rainbow splashed throughout.
The Wonderment! The Jubilee! TO BE CONTINUED…
