Acid Washed Eighties

It’s a karmic thang. At least for me. I’m firmly settled on the fact that when what I’ll call…"humbling” photos of me emerge, I must reveal them. I’ve tried to destroy most of the worst ones but every now and then a few will emerge from the vapors.

I’d like to think that I have a fairly decent moral code…a good sense of right and wrong without a big pile of stuff for which I need to ask forgiveness. I try to roll rather clean in that regard because my other burdens are generally heavy enough to tote. And since I’m not prone to mince words when calling others out on their shrunken clothes, unbuckled monk strap impertinence; I feel that it’s my calling to share the absurdity of my former missteps.

And the record already shows that I readily admit to and reveal my sartorial missteps and poorly guided decisions regarding dress and deportment. My one hundred damn percent polyester banana Prom episode is on the record visually and in print. Right here. 

Oh, and I was reasonably self-deprecating, here, in my first girl, Nik-Nik shirt story.

So my best childhood buddy, DCA starts texting me photos the other week when I was back home. DCA and his wife were preparing a slide show for their son’s birthday celebration and he ran across a gaggle of photos of us from the early eighties. Oy. I think DCA knew that I needed cheering up a bit and the photos were nothing short of guffaw worthy. Oy. Again.

Some might say that photos of this type should be destroyed…never revealed and if they did emerge, full denial of knowing the subject therein would be the best strategy. This I cannot do. See again my opening statements. So here we have my porn star mustache phase in full furl. Furl—yep. We gotta caterpillar rolled up and sittin’ right there. On my upper lip.What. Was. I. Thinking? Alas.

But it gets worse. Acid washed? DCA is on the left and RCC is in the middle. I remember this particular evening clearly. We were celebrating RCC’s wife’s birthday, drinking at The Cellar in Charlotte, N.C. At least I’d shed the mustache. And the fact that I had on Polo Ralph white bucks offers zero compensation for the acid washed shitake that had me preening like some kinda high-waisted soccer mom. I believe the waist band on these babies hit me just below the nipples. Shut up.

At least I wasn’t wearing my Jimmy damn Connors loves Roscoe Tanner tennis hot pants like this cat was.

I don’t know what to say about this one. Polo Rowdy loafers. On a pontoon boat in the middle of Lake Murray. With a Totie Fields moo-moo on. At least when I cross dressed, I did so with an eye for practicality and comfort. Shut ____.

And here’s the photo that almost made me run off the road when it came through on my iPhone. Oh lordy. Saturday morning in the men’s store. Surprise...I was hungover. Interestingly, all three of us in this photo went on to become entrepreneurs and business owners. DWT and DCA have enviable net worths today. I have a negative one. And DCA already had contact lens, thank goodness but for some reason that morning, he hadn’t yet put them in. His glasses weighed eleven pounds. But who am I to trash talk his momentary, pre-contact lens, bug-eyed-ness. Look at my porthole sized glasses and my “I need to look like Harry Reems” mustache. This is bad. I haven’t much else to say about this butcept that I thought until now that the seventies were bad sartorial years. I’m now clear on the fact that even though I was making my way out of a dark decade and into marginally better sartorial and grooming habits, I still had a long way to go.

Forgive me.

ADG II...travelling on business. Thank goodness.