Home Ickby Eva Pasco 
Spiraling
down Jefferson Airplane's Go Ask Alice when she's
ten feet tall looking glass of the
sixties, I find myself winding along
the linoleum corridors, a seventh grader at Lincoln
Junior High. I spot a yellow piece of paper
the size of a credit card on the floor. Those coveted
"passes" bearing a teacher's John Hancock allowed
us students a furlough of two minutes travel time out of
class to the lavatory. In this day and age when one is
advised to wash hands for the amount of time it takes to
sing "Happy Birthday," those passes wouldn't
have afforded much freedom--unless all you intended to do was
take a few drags on a cig.
Teachers
stood outside their classroom doors to monitor these "letters
of transit." One sentinel was Mrs. L, the Home Economics
teacher. Well-groomed, tall, regal, and authoritative,
she rounded up the usual suspects to interrogate for
bogus passes with forged signatures while her girls filed into the
Home Ec room. Once inside
her domain, you forfeited your identity by stuffing
your locks into a hairnet and donning a pinafore apron for the
cooking segment of Ick.
I remember
well my role for one such recipe of the
day-- breaking an egg over dry mixture. Too Timid
to crack the shell, Mrs. L's penetrating voice squeaked like a
shrill violin, "I can tell you never bake at home." The
buck didn't stop with me. She'd threaten to trim bangs
if they hung in your eyes. She'd admonish you
to stand up straight. She'd reprimand you to pick up
your feet and walk gracefully like a lady. She'd voice her
displeasure with those who wore heavy makeup with a tsk tsk
and, "Did your mother see you leave the house like
that?"
The worst part
of Ick was sewing. I'd never
even threaded a needle, let alone wield a fork to crack an
egg. To say I found it challenging to decipher the
foreign symbols of a Simplicity pattern, as well
as possess the dexterity to pin tissue paper on
fabric and cut along dotted lines and around
notches, was an understatement. I can't tell you how many
times Mrs. L had me "rip out seams" because they were
crooked. And how she hated seeing
long strings hanging from those garments! "Lazy women's
threads," she'd call them.
Truth
is, these A-line skirts were behind the eight ball
fashion plate--especially at Mrs. L's decreed modest
length below the knee. The only girl who ever wore
this byproduct of Home Ick in public was
statuesque, Sophia Loren-like Nelda--and not by choice, let me
tell you. Nelda happened to be in the cubby for Mrs. L
to pin up her hem. The fire alarm box sounded off for a
routine firedrill. Mrs. L coerced Nelda to come out of
the cubby and file out with her raggedy-edged skirt grazing her
ankles. That's when I knew our teacher had a soft spot for
us. Sensing Nelda's embarrassment, she draped her
own full-length coat over her. Once outside in the
quadrangle, the rest of us girls shivered
and shielded Nelda from the Shop boys who didn't
seem to mind their own full-length aprons flapping in the
breeze.
During the
innocence of the early sixties, Mrs. L presided
over a curriculum designed to mold impressionable girls
into refined young ladies under the subject headings
of cooking, sewing, babysitting, and good
grooming. Given the relaxed dress code and shakier moral
grounds of today, I'm sure she would roll her eyes and
tsk tsk as a procession of girls entered her
domain sporting nose rings, pink streaks, tattoos, and belly
shirts.
Copies of
"Underlying Notes" by Eva Pasco may be purchased
here:
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.jpg "The 60s - Carl - 1968 - Vietnam")
