Gallery of regrettable dresses

Oh man, y'all, this whole prom dresses thing is bringing me back to some BAD flashbacks of fashion choices.

Like I just remembered:

The Belle Ball of 1982. I was a freshman. Oh so young. Baby, really. I had a HUGE crush on this boy named Brian. He, unfortunately had a HUGE crush on my best friend at the time, Rachel. I asked him to the Belle Ball. That was painfully hard for me to do, but he said yes, and I was thrilled. So to make it special, the day of the Ball I got my hair cut. Up til then I had long hair that my Mom sort of arranged into a series of Three's Company ponytails. Either one on each side or one high one in the back or whatever. I had that hair whacked off into the most butch dyke haircut you can imagine. But in true 80's style, without products, it looked like a hair helmet. Old lady hair helmet. Oh it was BAD.

My dress? Oh the dress went GREAT with the hair. It was a poofy pink strapless net and lace HOOPED affair. A hooped dress with butch dyke hair? Oh man. Every time I sat down my dress swooped up and popped me in the face. I had to stuff it between my legs and hold tight or it would just attack me again. Everyone and I do mean EVERYONE was treated to an impromptu view of my underwear at some point in that night. And the dress tore, so I had to safety pin it up at the shoulder.

That was a bad night. I so did not know how to be on a date, and every bit of that night goes down in memory as an excruciating reminder of why I did not have many dates in high school. And why the boys I liked always went for my friends instead of tall, gawky Nympho Eyed me....

I gotta find the picture from this. Maybe my folks have it and can scan it.

Oh but it gets better. Sophomore year my dress was almost an exact replica of Lady Di's wedding dress. I had no idea it was until, like, YEARS later, when I realized, holy crap! Replica of Lady Di's dress! (Bummer, really, as the dress was quite unique at the time and I would have been bummed had I known it was a knockoff. I really really liked that dress....) My date was a basketball player I had a crush on (he also went for one of my friends) and he had a twin brother. Between the two of them, there were like 13 feet of Holmes brothers. Anyhow, he wore an exact replica of Kevin Bacon's tux in Footloose. And we all thought it was totally cool. In retrospect I should have asked the other brother. He was nicer.

So to recap: 10th grade dance. I'm Lady Di and he's Kevin Bacon. And we both thought we were the shit. Oh holy crap.

High school is just painful, y'all. Just painful.