Telling Tales Out of School

I know that my 7th grade Home Economics teacher, Miss Eckersley, would be appalled by my use of the word "butt" in my Legends of the Fall post. She stressed to her students that cultured young ladies should use the word "derriere" when referring to their backside. Miss Eckersley had no sense of humor and her comment made our sides ache from holding in the laughter. I guess there wasn't a cultured young lady in the whole class. We thought she was saying that you should call your butt "your dairy air."

"Hey, speak for yourself, Eckersley! We don't smell like cows. We take a bath every day. "

Miss Eckersley's own personal hygiene habits were suspect since we speculated that she washed her hair only on Saturday nights. This was the mid 60s with teased bouffant hairdos. Back then, women would go to the salon to get their hair teased up once a week and then do everything to try to preserve the hairdo until the next hairdresser's appointment. Some women wrapped their heads in toilet paper and slept on a special neck pillow that kept your hairdo suspended in mid-air to keep it from being smashed in your sleep. Urban legends about women with spider nests in their hair were rampant.

When Miss Eckersley showed us how to sew in a zipper, we all stood around behind her as she sat and took command of her sewing machine. Someone got the devilish notion to insert sewing pins into Miss Eckersley's teased and lacquered hairdo while she was busy demonstrating proper sewing techniques. For every sewing demonstration, Miss Eckersley must have acquired about 100 pins in her hair. She never said anything about finding pins in her hair. I think she got her revenge on us by requiring the each girl in class to use the same pattern to make a shapeless dress with a drawstring neckline. Think potato sack with raglan sleeves. To really humble us, she said that our grade on our dress project would be cut if we didn't wear the dress we made to school at least once. Most of us procrastinated until the last day of school for our fashion parade. That day, you would have thought we the Ringling Brothers Circus was in town. Dozens of girls in my class were wearing the buffoonish drawstring bag dresses in assorted bright floral prints. My friends' class had a more challenging outfit - a modest-length skirt with a zipper and a blouse with a plain rounded neckline involving sewing on neck facing. Zippers were skewed and facings were hanging out like ruffled clown collars. I'm sure that Miss Eckersley had the last laugh.