About fitting in after moving to the US during high school.
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My mom sewed my dresses when I was in elementary school. We would go to the store, usually J.C. Pennys and she and I would pick out patterns and fabric for the dresses.
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Back in elementary school in Oakland CA, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. We treasured the days when a field trip to a farm or park allowed us to come to school in our stretch pants – sometimes with stirrups on the feet! Disneyland made women and girls wear dresses to the park, and when taking an airline flight, one got dressed up.

By the time I hit junior high, the school district had loosened up the dress code. Jeans and pants were thankfully allowed. We worked hard to break in our Levi’s 501’s – no pre-washed in those days. No women’s styles, either. We proudly marched into the men’s department and tried on those treasured button front jeans. We welcomed the holes that eventually formed in the knees, and sometimes helped the process along. When they got too ratty, you just cut them off and had a pair of shorts or a skirt. No hems, of course.

Unlike Gillian’s story, we were allowed to wear mini, midi or maxi length skirts to school. I was always a shy child, but I wanted to fit in with the cool kids, so I convinced my mom to buy me a maxi skirt. The day I wore it to school I felt so uncomfortable because I just knew everyone was staring at me. Of course they weren’t, but my insecure side was sure they were. That skirt did not get a lot of wear. I do still have the mini dress, with maxi coat that I did wear quite a bit. Its in a box of memorable clothing that also includes my hippie style knitted vest with fringe at the bottom, and my hippie headband.

High school brought Hot Pants and Sizzlers – not the steak house:-) – into fashion. Looking back, a sizzler outfit was pretty much the same as the toddler dresses we wore with the little frilly matching underpants. Who would have thought! I sure hope that fashion statement doesn’t make a comeback.

It was a time of experimentation and self-expression, and self-express we did.
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We lived at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. The hay field across the road served as a planetarium surrounded by stone walls and maples. From there, the night sky unfolded for us: an unusual moon, the northern lights, an eclipse, but now. . . who could predict?

“Tonight!” My old man shouted. “Sputnik! It’s going to orbit right over our heads. We’ll be able to see it.”

“I thought it was the size of a basketball,” I mumbled. “How’re we gonna see it?”

“It’s a sphere,” my old man said. “It magnifies reflected light.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Look it up. Plug in the ratio of lumens as a function of sphere circumference and distance. . .”

“Distance?” I grumbled. “Distance to what?”

“In this particular situation, my boy. . .” My old man liked to imitate W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny. That night he was W.C. Fields. “The distance from satellite to earth and sun to satellite, the circumference of the sphere. From our vantage point (nobody said POV back then), it should look like an orbiting Venus.”

“Won’t that be lovely,” my mother chimed in. “Venus. Like Botticelli, in that clamshell, for the whole world to see.” My mother was an exhibitionist.

My old man pushed away from the table. He lit the sticky-sweet, cherry-stink tobacco in his five-dollar, Huckleberry Finn, corncob pipe and gazed up at the darkening sky. “For the whole world to see.”

Most people looked upon the unblinking mini-moon as a threat. The Soviets had shot the damned thing up there with a super-powerful spaceship, proving they could send anything anywhere. The Ruskie satellite orbited the heads of humans worldwide, a lighthouse for the devil. “If the commies can do that,” our authorities told us, “they can do whatever they want.” They would then elaborate, giving specifics about whatever aspect of the communist threat was being featured that week.

“Paranoid bullshit.” A backhand flick of the wrist dismissed the partisan fears. My old man was beyond all that. “Give it time. That little ball is going to unite the world.”

Now the family stood in the meadow gazing upwards into the sprawled bowl of stars. Would Sputnik drift? Would it float? Would it crawl so slow as to render its orbit imperceptible, the way the planets sidled across the night sky? Or would it fail, descend, and burn out like a meteor?

“There!” I shouted, my voice adolescent and shrill. A small orb, gleaming with mercurial clarity, broke over the treetops from the east and glided, slow, smooth, and silent across the cold New England sky.

“Jiminy!” my mother said.

“Just like a tiny Venus,” my sister said.

“That’ll make the Pentagon crap in its pants,” my old man said.

Amid Cold War infestation, my old man managed to impart a love for the patterns and structures and physics of astronomy in his son. Despite my resistance, my father’s spiritual, non-religious enthusiasm for the music of the celestial spheres had infected me with curiosity about the world, the planets, the solar system, the galaxy, and how the entire fucking Universe might operate.

I thought sputnik was beautiful beyond belief.

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Craig gained additional notoriety in 1990 when he appeared in newspaper ads modeling Calvin Klein briefs—and nothing else.
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