My first car was a 1972 Dodge Dart. I bought it with my own money when I was sixteen. It had a brown body and forest green roof. Although its official name was “The Mallard,” I mostly just called it “The Dart.” I also sometimes jokingly referred to my car as “The Sex Machine.”

Trust me, no sex was had in this vehicle.*

There was some kissing, though. The passenger seat belt had a tendency to jam, and I had to lean over and yank on it in just the right way. I took advantage of this when giving rides to boys. They liked it when I helped them with their seat belts and felt compelled to thank me properly.

Okay, it only happened with two boys, but they were both mind-boggingly cute. Thanks, Dart!

*At least, not by me. But the car was already twenty years old when I bought it, so who knows what kind of action that back seat had seen over the years?

I took an introductory German class in ninth grade and really enjoyed it (the first blossoms of my grammar nerdity). One morning, Herr Mann was giving a lesson about the weather and going over all the relevant vocabulary. I asked for a pass to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, Herr Mann was reviewing a list of terms on the board. He asked me, “Sarah, imagine it’s a sunny day, and you feel sweaty. What would you say?”

I scanned the words on the board, and saw hot = heiss.

“Ich bin heiss,” I answered. Literal translation: “I am hot.”

The class erupted in laughter. Heat crept into my cheeks, and I wrinkled my brow in confusion.

“Ich bin heiss means ‘I am hot sexually,’” explained Herr Mann. “You should have said, ‘Mir ist heiss.’”

How the flip was I supposed to know that? I scowled at Herr Mann for preying on my ignorance and never asked him for the bathroom pass again.

Sophomore year of high school, I received three pieces of green clothing from Santa: leggings, an oversize turtleneck, and a long, off-the-shoulder sweater. I loved them all and wore them often. I eventually found out through the grapevine that a boy who didn’t like me was keeping track of how often I wore each piece.

Have I mentioned that I’m from a small town where there was very little to do?

I think that proves it.

I entered junior high in 1988, a particularly unfortunate year for fashion and hairstyles (or one of the best, depending on your point of view). I followed a few of the trends. I had acid-washed jeans and a spiral perm. But since I wasn’t one of the cool kids and knew that my attempts to climb the social ladder would only lead to a world of pain, I didn’t have as much of a stake in some of the more extreme looks that were popular at the time. I never, for example, sported the claw, a.k.a. mall bangs.

Looking at what could have been fills me with deep regret.

I’ve been amused to see the comeback of skinny jeans since they were all the rage in the late eighties. The main difference now is that, thanks to stretch denim, the jeans of the today don’t require the wearer to do anything extra to make them skin-tight. I had several pairs of jeans in junior high with zippers at the ankles, and that was good enough for me. A lot of kids, however, resorted to safety-pinning the cuffs of their pants to get them as tight as possible. They stashed extra pins in their lockers, and some people even sold them for a small profit.

I actually got made fun of for not pinning my pants or ratting my bangs. Even back then, amidst all that bad fashion, I knew that this was messed up and wrong.

I was an alto in the junior high choir. One day, for my own amusement, I passed around a note that said, “Look at the footprints on the ceiling.”

They all totally fell for it.

Here’s a story pulled from the archives of my old blog, where I referred to myself in the third person as Babs. Enjoy!

One weekend, when Babs was in tenth grade, she and her mother found themselves in the midst of the most amazing sale at Target.  The Misses department was overflowing with incredible bargains.  Denim jumpers for $3.29!  Burgundy mock turtlenecks for $2.09!  Jeans!  Cotton sweaters in jewel tones!  Stupid red wooden clogs with heart cut-outs!  Babs had a $20 bill in her pocket from a recent baby-sitting stint, and she was determined to make it go as far as possible.

As Babs and her mother frantically sifted through the racks, they came across a plain straight black skirt made out of sweatshirt fabric.  When Babs tried it on, the hem fell well below the knee.  It looked classy.  The orange tag on the skirt glowed with the beautiful price of $1.00.  There wasn’t even a question.

When Babs got home, she dumped the large bag crammed with cheap shirts and jeans on her bed and fished the black skirt out from the bottom of the pile.  She put it on and studied herself in the full-length mirror.  The skirt nicely silhouetted her still-developing hips and made her look even taller than 5′8″.  Everything was great.  Babs wore the skirt to school the next day with her favorite black and white checked blouse and her red rose ribbon pin attached to the top button by her collar.

No one noticed her new skirt.  Babs was a little disappointed by this, especially since her mother had gushed about it over breakfast.

Something had to be done.

Now, before this story goes any further, it should be known that Babs harbored a nasty little habit before she reached legal adulthood.  When she was three, she took a scissors to her hair and fashioned quarter-inch bangs.  At age five, she tried to shave her face just like Daddy did, only to decorate her plain white turtleneck with irregular red polka dots.  And of course, her mother will never let her forget the afternoon in 1983 when she took every sweatshirt in the house and hacked out the neck and shoulders for the “Flashdance” look.  With a cutting tool in hand, Babs was a holy terror.  She liked to chop.

So when Babs got home from school that day, she immediately headed to her mother’s sewing closet and snatched the high-quality imported German scissors from their sleek brown case.  Then, she retired to her room and went to work.

The next morning, Babs’ mother stared in horror as her daughter seated herself at the breakfast table.

“I don’t like what you’ve done to your skirt,” Babs’ mother said, getting up from the table.

Babs smiled.  Mission accomplished.

When Babs arrived at school, everyone noticed the skirt this time.  Babs had fashionably paired it with a black sweater, black tights, and made a headband out of this cool batiked silk scarf with lots of red and pink in it.  The only real flaw in the outfit was her shoes.  Babs had foolishly chosen her black patent leather flats with bows on the ends to complete the ensemble.  Fortunately, no one was paying much attention to her shoes.  As for the skirt, it was about a foot long.  Babs was not planning to bend over that day.

On her way to her first class, Babs spied a knot of the bitchiest clique of seniors.

“Nice freakin’ outfit,” Candi muttered.

“Cha!  Skank-o-rama,” agreed Brandi.

Since everyone in this group was wearing jeans so tight they looked painted on and had bangs at least 6″ tall, Babs let these comments stand on their own.  She walked into biology and was greeted by several cat calls from the boys and hostile glances from the girls.

Later, in the locker room, a couple of Babs’ acquaintances approached her and told her that her outfit was so, so….well, black, really.  Babs smiled and thanked them for the compliment.  In English class, DeWayne gently yanked on Babs’ headband and she turned around.  Normally, DeWayne would just ask Babs to lean to one side so that he could copy her test paper or tell her how crappy her hair looked.  But today, DeWayne was grinning like a drunk pig.

“You look hot, Babs.  Say, I was gonna go mudding in my four-wheeler this weekend out in the woods and I was thinking that–”

“Can’t. Have play practice.”  And Babs turned around and wrote “Edger Alen Poe sure wrote funny pomes real good.  My favrite was ‘The Jaberwalky’.”  She leaned sideways so that DeWayne could copy it, which he did.  Then, she erased it, composed a stunning analysis of “Annabelle Lee,” and turned in her test.

Babs’ mother was folding a huge stack of cloth diapers when Babs got home from school.  She eyed her daughter up and down and then told her that she was not to wear that skirt again.  Babs sulked, then went up to her room and threw the skirt in the trash.  However, she was still reeling from how much power could be communicated through such a small piece of fabric.  Guys had practically panted.  Girls that were normally a little bitchy toward her grew fangs dripping with venom.  And for once, none of the teachers seemed to want to call on her.  It would be several years before Babs wore an outfit like that again.  But by that time, she had a much better grasp of the Power of the Skirt.

Every October, my college has a campus-wide evening of blind dates. Officially, the event is called “Set Up Your Roommate,” but we all called it “Screw Your Roommate” and even got little screws in our mailboxes as a reminder.

Freshman year, I left myself entirely in the hands of my roommate. My date for the evening wasn’t at all impressed when I suggested we go to the 9:00 showing of Dirty Dancing in the science building, but he didn’t have any better ideas. The onscreen heat between Baby and Johnny failed to inspire my date and me, and we parted amicably at the end of the evening.

The next year, I was already in rabid crush mode by the time Screw Your Roommate came around. I had my sights on a freshman I’d met while baking cookies in one of the campus houses. He reminded me of a young Val Kilmer and always simultaneously raised his chin and eyebrows when he saw me.

It left me in a puddle of my own drool every time.

I’m sure my roommate (not the same one I’d had freshman year) would have been glad to set me up with Val Kilmer, but I was embarrassed. So I did what any girl does when she wants to go on a not-so-blind date with her crush: I called Val’s roommate and pretended to be my roommate.

My date with Val started off really well, and we were totally hitting it off. We went for a walk and got to know each other. Then we went out for sandwiches. Finally, we ended up back at his room, where he put on Dark Side of the Moon and dimmed the lights so I could admire the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling.

I was pretty giddy at this point and confident that we were about to make out. So I did what any girl who later writes a book called TMI would do: I told Val that I’d called his roommate and arranged our date. Val furrowed his brow slightly and said he was tired. Date over.

From then on, whenever I saw Val, he always said hi, but the chin-eyebrow raises stopped. And it was all my fault.

When I was in fifth grade, all the popular girls wore Coca-Cola shirts, Guess jeans, and Reebok high-top sneakers (preferably pink ones). I was certain that once I procured this particular ensemble, world domination would be mine.

A few Christmases and birthdays went by, and I finally had all the requisite pieces. I stepped out in my outfit, which was teetering on the edge of out-of-date. As I walked down the hall past the popular girls, I heard the Queen Bee say, “Look, even Sarah has Guess jeans now.”

“They must not be cool anymore,” was the reply from one of her minions.

Ouch.

In seventh grade, I was standing in line with my friend, Janie, in the cafeteria. As we neared the kitchen, we noticed an object hanging from the doorknob.

“It kind of looks like a balloon,” Janie said.

I squinted and peered closer. “Yeah, only it’s sort of clear. And the shape is weird.”

Janie and I fingered the mysterious balloon for a few moments and walked away, shrugging.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized we’d been touching a condom.

After a rousing evening with friends, my man and I were in the supermarket shopping for snacks. I really wanted Old Dutch potato chips, and my man didn’t. I was wearing lipstick, so I kissed the box of chips and said, “Ha! Now we have to get them.”

He couldn’t argue with that.