If you didn’t know me during high school, here’s what you missed.

Rad Bauhaus shirt, huh? In case you can’t tell, my hair was buzzed down to about a quarter inch, save the bangs. (Also: this was the same year I requested that my then-boyfriend administer a tattoo of my own design, using a homemade tattoo gun he’d gotten from some classmate of his who’d been in jail or something? It was a very small tattoo, as it turned out, because a guitar string makes for kind of an oversized needle.)

Here, a bunch of my kooky peers and I show off our respective senses of fashion.  I was really into the band London After Midnight then. Also: I got that lacy top at JC Penney. Yeah, you kids get all your schmattas at Hot Topic now, but us? Huh. We had to ask our parents to drive us into Hermosa Beach to the one store in the South Bay that carried what we wanted to wear. That, or get creative with the old lady department at Penney’s. We knew what hard work was, then…

Did I mention I liked London After Midnight? I sure liked them. You can tell, right? Man, I loved those leggings, too. It still makes me happy to see them in this photo. Incidentally, those six-eye Docs I’m wearing there? I’m not sure if you can see the scuffs and scratches on them, but it took me the better part of an entire lunch period to kick that new-leather look off of them on the asphalt steps by the photo room, where I used to hang out (in case the teacher I was smitten with decided to walk by on the way to his classroom).

Alright, look, I’ve said enough.