Where Have All the T Shirts Gone?

Spirit Week next week at the school!!  Yaaaay!!  Funny Hat day, Dress Up day,
Wear Orange day, and 1990s day.  Each grade was assigned a color, and first grade got my favorite, orange.  I love orange, and have decided that I am going to be so damn orange, you'd think a spray tan of Q-T mixed with drive-in movie snack bar orangeade couldn't compete with with this orange.  Think Oompah Loompah meets the capital of Florida with a orange-licious aroma, and that will be me.  No, seriously, I'm not dying my skin, but a nice outline of Orange-Glo lipstick will top off the iris-searing dress that's the color of a gas jet burning off pollutants at the oil refinery.

But that's not the problem.  My kids like having a teacher that's sort of with it, and thus a trip to the Google was invoked as a way to find out what the hell 1990s American fashion was doing.  I don't know, have no inkling, those were the busy years and I was nose deep in college paperwork.  Apparently, I missed Grunge.  The word is familiar, but I know it isn't the safety pin through the ear Punk business, nor the pale, empty milk carton complexion of Goth.  Is it just a week's worth of dirt?  Grunge? Let's see.

What erupted was a series of clean people in flannel shirts, ripped jeans, and rock band t shirts.  Maybe Doc Martens.  But dayum if a trip to AmVets wasn't in order to shuffle through the myriad rock star t shirts remembered of old.  Well har de har har, Coburn.  Out of 90 feet of clothes rack, there was one Kid Rock, one KISS, a Jimi Hendrix, and someone called Chemical Romance.  WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?  I know Hendrix, but the image was wreathed in smoke which is a no for school.  Same with those men who looked like they had gotten into your sister's steam curlers and took the vacuum cleaner apart, after watching He-Man cartoons while emptying Dad's Wild Turkey onto their cornflakes. Not for me.  Kid Rock was aiming a gun at the viewer with stylized nekkid wimmens framing the play dates on the back of the shirt.  You gotta be kidding.

What happened?  Most of the t shirts were corporate fund raisers, college sports teams, bars in Florida, Tim Horton's, one sad Native American with an upset wolf, sexual commentary, or awareness for blood types.  Where are the rock bands?  Do we have rock bands anymore?  Are they not producing t shirts?  How am I to get down with the 1990s?

The strangest one was titled "Burn Masculinity at Spook Camp" with a simple contour lined trio of two girls holding hands with a boy in flames.  I think it was a boy because there were scattered lines depicting hair on the legs; but who really can say, as the whole thing looked like it was drawn by a Golden Retriever with a happy tail.  I just know those were flames shooting up from the shoulders, enveloping the head and baseball cap.  I should go buy it.  You think it's still there?

Chemical Romance came home with me, they seem appropriate for school; a collarless shirt with blue stripes to be tossed over, several embarrassing 90s makeup trends like totally rimmed inner eyelid dark blue eyeliner with scrunched, gelled hair, frosted leepsteeck, and butterfly hair clips will knock their socks off.  But who came up with the 90s as a fun day for Spirit Week?  I'll tell you who.

The twenty-somethings.  The younger faculty to whom the 90s seem alien and quaint compared to today's ultra computerized polymer fashion.  Lemme tell ya, I went to a Painting Party the other night where the studio had hooked into Pandora, which is some sort of radio station.  These grown women, my colleagues, were gushing like oil strikes over Justin Bieber.  I was floored.  I had never heard the boy, but I learned that the college education which all these women possess counts for nothing when it comes to the auto-tuned Biebs.  I painted harder.  If you look, there is hidden message spelled out in the leaves of the trees in my painting.  Flexible little Biebs.

Good night, good night.  Less than a week before the time changes into a lovely, lengthening of daylight.  Buds and robins are bursting, Lent is in the midst of penance for those who like that sort of thing, and the first spider of the season spun a web in my bathroom window.  On the inside frame.  Hopeful thing, probably hungry, maybe I can lure a few ubiquitous fruit flies into the bathroom if I leave an apple out.  Maybe I can lure Justin Bieber into the bathroom, and look the other way as the spider wraps him up like a tamale.  

Sleep well, spring forward.