Saturday, December 24, 2011

Valley girls

I was reading Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner, this morning and came across a passage about a craze for pet tortoises, and I suddenly remembered an exotic fad from my junior high days.

In my little town in Silicon Valley, many girls wore Pendleton skirts and Peter Pan collars decorated with circle pins. But the fashion forward bejeweled themselves with chameleons yoked with tiny gold rings and tethered to their blouses with fine gold chains. The girls claimed the lizards changed colors, a prelude I guess to mood rings, which came a bit later. Looking back, I wonder how these elite girls felt about the need to feed their finery with live prey. Or perhaps they didn’t do it. It was a passing fancy, as I recall.

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