Self-Portrait Challenge: Introduce Yourself, Week 2

The Story of Deb Last week, on The Story of Deb: Episode One - The First Ten Years, I began my introduction for this month's Self-Portrait Challenge. Now, to continue my introduction, Red Shoe Ramblings is pleased to present: Episode Two - The Teen Decade Warning: This post may contain graphic scenes of bad skin, bad hair, and questionable fashion choices. Viewer discretion is advised. During our first installment, I told you about the first ten years of my life and how I acquired a brother, a sister, and a love of cake. We'll now continue The Story of Deb with my exciting second decade! Yeah, baby! For a little while the second 10 years continued pretty much the same as the first, albeit without the arrival of any more siblings. There was still cake though, as you can see in this photo taken on my 13th birthday: You want to know what's really scary about that photo? I did NOT have a perm. That's just what my hair did when the stylist cut it into the circa 1975 "gypsy shag." Oy. It was also about this time that I started realizing that boys could sometimes be interesting and not-entirely-icky. (Which is still pretty much my position on that issue.) It's hard to find photographic evidence of that though, because at some point in my late teen years I went through one of many spells of teen angst and burned most of my pics of any and all ex-boyfriends. I don't even remember why anymore. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then there was at least one pic where I just cut the boy in question out of the photo. On the far left photo below, I've drawn a little stand-in where the boyfriend used to be. That was taken on "1950's Day" during our school's Spirit Week, which is why I'm wearing a skirt with petticoats that make my ass look as big as Cleveland. I promise I didn't normally dress like that. My regular, everyday bad clothes were entirely different! I thought all photos of my high school boyfriends were gone until I found a few in amongst my mom's things, like the center photo below. You can tell Mom took the pic by the interesting camera angle and the cut-off portion of The Boyfriend's head. That was Mom's signature photo-taking style. And speaking of style, the choice of which sweater to wear must've been really important since it got saved for posterity. I wonder what I decided. Hhhmmm... That's probably about all that needs to be shared about the high school years. I liked hanging with my friends, but hated the school itself and couldn't wait to get out of there! Luckily, the school I went to was non-traditional and the way the curriculum was set up made it easy to graduate early if that's what a person wanted to do. I wanted. So I did. About 2 months after my 17th birthday, I graduated from high school and around 3 months after that, I was off to college to major in art. I spent most of the first semester of college having a helluva good time as I went a little crazy with my first taste of being away from home for more than just a week at summer camp. But eventually I settled down (more-or-less), acquired a steady boyfriend and a core group of girlfriends, and started doing what needed to be done to pass the annoyingly necessary classes that regularly interrupted my schedule of gab sessions, dates, card games, and assorted spirited high jinks. About three months before I turned 20 I was a candidate for Homecoming Queen. No, I didn't win. Not even close. I was an ArtGeek, not one of the popular kids. So this is maybe not even much of a highlight, but these happen to be the last photos I found of me for the teen decade, so they got included. The parade gave me the chance to show the world (well, one small town anyway) the butt-ugly afghan I crocheted in high school - the only crochet project I ever finished. As I recall, the parade was kind of fun, but then my at-that-time-boyfriend and I obviously switched into our Walking Undead mode for the awards ceremony. Good times! What happened next was really exciting! I... To Be Continued Please join us next week for "The Story of Deb: The Roaring Twenties." (Some photos above are clickable if you want to see them larger, and with others what you see is what you get. If you want to see more, give 'em a try and see what happens!)