Scene from February Some Year, a.k.a. How To Embarrass Yourself Completely Without Having A Wardrobe Malfunction, A Nervous Breakdown In Public, or even Being Seen By Anyone You Know:1. Re-watch The Hairy Bird (or whatever title your DVD says it's got) for the 1000th time.
2. Begin craving prissy school-uniform-like clothing as a consequence, especially the pleated skirts.
3. Go on an mission to find and buy pleated skirts to wear.
4. Fail miserably because the local clothing store buyers are probably secret school uniform fetishists at heart, as a result of which every pleated skirt on the rails of a commercial clothing store is far too short to prevent knicker-flashing if one leans down to tie a loose shoelace, and resembles slutwear more than schoolwear. ( also, any actual schoolgirl in one of these would be sent straight home to change before being allowed over the threshold of a classroom)
4. Give up in disgust.
5. Go home to visit parents, and notice that there is a girls' school next to their house.
6. A girls' school with pleated-skirt-featuring school uniforms! (the skirts in question blessedly go all the way to the knee, just like in the picture above. Unlike the one in the picture above, however, they are worn by girls, not boys).
7. Unfortunately, they're actual school uniforms. Only to be worn by their students.
8. You are not a student of the school in question. You are also too old - much too old- to be a student. 20-something years old, to be exact.
9. That doesn't stop you.They are nice, eminently prim knee-length things with a very handy pocket in the side.
10. Prepare a long-winded cover story for the tailors to explain why a non-student wants a school skirt (because no one's going to believe the truth, let's face it), involving an absent younger sister- I have none- needing a new uniform, and handing over measurements and payment with preferably minimal fuss and no investigation.
11. Rehearse the story a couple of times, for good measure.
13. Have the plan fall flat on its face once the tailor asks, without even allowing you to get to the sister story, which class you are in, and therefore need a uniform skirt for.
14. Much to your own horror, play along with the mistake, but not without major redface and the expectation that your nose is growing at a speed to beat Pinnochio's. It's one thing to finagle a uniform skirt out of the tailors under false pretences, quite another to have to pretend to be an actual high schooler to get it.
15. Feel like an even bigger fraud when you actually get the (very reasonably priced, entirely innocuous-looking) skirt in your mitts a week later.
16. But since fashion has the collective memory span of a goldfish, turn completely shameless and wear it anyway.
image from www.tokyobopper.com
