River City Jules: Fashion faux pas through the ages

“Who’s that?” my children simultaneously cried while watching old home movie footage from my stint as an ice cream scooper at Baskin Robbins in 1987.

Their horror turned to laughter as I confessed that the geeky girl in the giant glasses with the worst home perm ever in the history of home perms, the complete nerd with the bump on her nose that she got when she accidentally closed a window on it, the perfectly square peg wearing the company-issued striped smock, coated collar to hem in mint chocolate chip ice cream … was their mother.

Long before Ugly Betty, there was Fashion Faux Pas Jules, flashing her braces (usually filled with Ho-Ho’s) and strutting her stuff (in her orthotics) all around town (except during allergy season, when she stayed indoors and worked on her cadaver-like complexion).

There was no winning my battle for beautification. I overcame The Haircut of ’82 (unlike Kristin Wiig’s Target Lady) only to endure one failed hot roller experiment after another. I tried everything I saw in my Seventeen magazines, usually all at once, but to no avail. No matter how much I longed to, I could not pull off neon bangles and leg warmers. Or fingerless gloves. Or big, glamorous bangs.

By the time Jennifer Aniston made it abundantly clear that those bangs were to be tamed and our mops shagged, I had long-abandoned my quest for style, having discovered any solid T-shirt worked well with khaki shorts, a discovery that began a 10-year run dressing myself every morning like the suburban mom version of a Wiggle. I strutted my stuff in my own Geranimals for grown-ups until recent years when my younger (taller, thinner), always on-trend sister, Kari, started making fun of me for wearing Bonnie Bell lip gloss and the same white T-shirt since 1996 with an intervention that included an introduction to bronzer and a thorough purging of my Birkenstocks.

Kari doesn’t know I secretly kept two pairs.

It would only stand to reason, then, that a person with my track record for keeping up with fashion would be the natural choice to emcee the upcoming Douglas County Medical Alliance Fashion Show at Van Go this Thursday.

Yes, the little girl who dreamed of one day dressing cool like the cast of “Facts of Life,” who then became the only college student to ever own a complete set of button covers before eventually blossoming into a mostly functioning woman who still doesn’t know how to use a flat iron, is going to narrate the runway for the evening.

But I am not scared. The giant glasses are gone, the perm has grown out and the nose was remodeled (after a fall down a flight of stairs in ’91). And while the girl in the striped smock remains, she knows Silly Banz are out, buying local is in and she even knows how to pronounce “Blahnik.” So look out, Heidi Klum, there’s a new project heading for the runway, and she’s leaving the orthotics at home!