Over at Lawyerish, I let it slip that I took Fashion and Decor in college. It’s true; I was a theatre major. That should help explain the long hair, anyway.
Fashion and Decor was a challenging class. It was basically a world history class from a design perspective. The first time around, I ended up dropping the class midway through the semester; it was hopeless. The second time I took it, somehow it just clicked. For a few glorious months, I had a clear timeline in my head of all the major artistic periods, from paleolithic to postmodern. It was amazing. I had taken social studies in high school, and art history and World Civ in college, but somehow it all came together in this one class.
Of course I’ve lost almost all of it, but I can still occasionally glimpse a flash here and there. I know what a cowl-neck sweater is. I know what an Empire waist looks like, and that it’s named after the First French Empire of Napoleon. I remember the ancient Egyptians wore kohl as eyeshadow to cut the glare from the sun, and perfumed cones on their heads to mask their body odor, because Egypt is very, very sunny and unbearably hot. When Sarah took me to Egypt, and London, and Florence, and Venice, I was able to hold my own next to her Master’s in Art History, all thanks to Professor Jim.
I remember there was a seventeenth-century hairstyle called the fontage, which was always accompanied by Jim’s outrageous faux-French pronunciation and a hand thrown up to the forehead, to suggest hair coiffed straight up, There’s Something About Mary-style.
There was a lot of French terminology being batted around, that semester. When Jim first mentioned L’Eminence Grise, I had no idea what he had just said. I leaned over to see how Dan had transcribed it in his notes:
LEMON-I-SCREEZ
And to this day, if you go up to Dan, or Keith, or Professor Jim himself, and say “lemon-i-screez!” he will laugh, and reply, “fontage!” and put the back of his hand up to his forehead.
I knew this would be awesome, and it *so* is. Now I wish I’d taken Fashion & Decor in college. AND been a theater major, but that’s another thing entirely.
Dude. THE HAIR. Tee hee.
Do you ever feel like you were smarter in college? I miss how smart I was in college. I knew so much STUFF, so many hifalutin theories and texts and how to tie them all together. And now I know about Sanjaya and The Bachelor and, well, lots of law. Le sigh.
Smarter? I don’t know. I wasn’t a terribly good student; the epiphany I experienced in Fashion and Decor was the exception to the rule. But I do know what you mean. I fell in love with the Macintosh my freshman year, and it was only a few months before I knew it *cold.* This was in the days of System 7, and I knew exactly what every single file on the computer was for. I memorized Microsoft Word 5.1 and I could literally run it blindfolded. Since the advent of OS X, I always feel a little bit lost. I know a lot more now than I did then, but there’s just so much more to know now. The number of files in the System folder has gone up logarithmically. I miss that feeling of omniscience.
As for the hair: yes. I know. It was completely ridiculous.
I still miss it sometimes. But Sarah said, and she said it a lot, that she wouldn’t have given me a second glance if it had been long when we met. So I’m glad I cut it.
When I took the class, we called it Fashionable Detour. And I think my final paper was something like “How the Leprechaun Single-Handedly Changed the Face of Fashion in Western Europe”. Submitted on Jim’s 11th 39th birthday.
Fontage!