Since I was born with a mild case of Cerebral Palsy, I wasn’t very well with sports or athletic tasks. I had to have physical therapy with a resource teacher at the elementary school. I hated it, because I felt so humiliated to have the therapy in a public place. Fifteen other kids were in the exercising room with me at the same time.

The resource teacher, Mr. C., had a couple high school students as his aides. We had to learn how to skip. I wasn’t very good at it, so he had one of the aides help me skip down the school halls. The teenager was very wild looking; she had a short ponytail on the side of her head. She wore very colorful clothes. She also wore huge earrings. The aide even struggled teaching me how to skip down the hall. I thought she was patient with me, and I also thought she could also be a teenage friend until school was out for the Summer. The end of the day, I walked down the hall to catch my bus, and I passed the aide, and kindly told her “bye”.

She was with a friend of hers, and yelled at me, “You better skip better next time – do you hear me!”

I was hurt and automatically figured she didn’t want to be friends. I shook in place for a minute until I could get myself to walked out the building doors. I was afraid to do therapy with her again. Since the day she yelled at me, I never saw her again. I never knew why she didn’t ever come back.

Wearing bellbottoms were still around during December of 1979, and they were very uncomfortable around the knees. E.M. Hall didn’t like wearing pants at all, and I didn’t blame her. E.M. tried to get away with wearing shorts to school, and wearing them at school was not allowed at all – no matter what the length was at the time. After the third time she wore shorts to school, the teacher walked up to the young blonde and warned her again, “E.M., I told you many times that you cannot wear shorts to school. You wear them at home after school. I will write a note to your mom, so you will stop wearing shorts.”

E.M. frowned and looked at Karmen. Then Karmen shook her head and said, “I told you not to wear shorts today.”

“I know…I know,” E.M. replied.

E.M. still wore shorts to school until the teacher made a call to E.M.’s mother to let her know that if she wore shorts again, she would be suspended. Then on, E.M. wore dresses to school, and they were very pretty dresses.

After Christmas/New Year holiday break from school, kids stopped wearing bellbottom pants. Pants were then very stiff legged, but they didn’t look so ugly anymore. I remember it was hard to bend my knees wearing them. I started wearing pants to school. I got tired of wearing dresses. E.M. still wore dresses. Every once in awhile, she would wear pants. She was very into wearing girly-girl outfits. Stephanie still liked wearing bellbottoms. I never knew why… She wore a lot of aqua, tan, and pink colored clothes.