This is going to be the LAST post on a stupid topic: pegged pants...

Most people who ever check into this mish-mash of what is left of my mind....

Never grew up in the Fifties. If you were a young boy, you wore balloon pants that were so baggy, you were amorphous, hey. Neuter.

And 'pegged pants' suddenly became the rage, and I hated the balloon pants. I was maybe thirteen or so. Elvis was King,, and there was a sort of new awareness. Cigarette Babies used to hang out in front of the Sweeney Post Lodge dance hall on Saturday nights, in everything that made them look even thinner than they were, tailored, and they had greased up duck-tails, and cigarettes hanging off their lips, and looked dangerous, and sexy. It was a VA bar with a huge hall upstairs, and me and my brother used to be onlookers. Watching negatives of a picture of 'fun'.

The girls came in petticoats, and the more they had, the better off they were, or something. I wanted to grow up and be cool, and 'dangerous' looking.

My brother was interested in the petticoats, and embarassed me totally by hanging upside down on a low fence, and counting how many they had as the girls walked by. He was ten, you couldn't take him ANYWHERE. And hardly innocent... he got caught playing doctor with a young girl his age under the porch when he was eight. 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours...' so to speak. But no one really made a huge deal out of it, which was good....

Yeah, so I wanted to be a 'hood', as we called them, short for hoodlums... And I did errands, and went out and got me a pair of pegged jeans with the money I made. I loved those jeans. And was excited, on my way to hoodlimism.... yes!

And I wanted to show them off to my cousin, what a cool thing I'd gotten for myself, and my Mom was there. The details are vague on that... But I came out in those new jeans, and nuclear followed.

My Mom said, 'YOU'RE not wearing THAT!' I was genuinely confused. 'Why?'

'Because you can see EVERYTHING, even the CRACK! Go to your room and change!'

Y'see, Puritanical.....

But the devil in me was delighted, and I WORE them because it was 'cool'.

That line has followed me for decades now. It was a mainstay in Peter and my relationship. If we were going somewhere? And he'd be 'inappropriate'? I'd say the magic words... 'Go to your room and change, hey...' And he LOVED that story. Hell, he loved all of her maxims for 'proper' living and even adhered to some of them.

He could laugh so hard when I'd do that. I found a whole list of her 'rules and regulations' for living he had written and tucked away when he was in the hospital once.

But 'Go to your room and change!' was one of the ones we delighted in.

Styles change, people change... oldies here go off the charts for kids wanting to look like Justin Bieber, or Goth or Punk and sort of become ghosts of my past, but it doesn't bother me. I just keep thinking... 'when they are 3o or so... someone will show them a picture of how they look now, and they are SO going to wince.' And I never had a picture of me in pegged jeans. But my Mom was more than cool. She was wise. 'Give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves.' That was my favorite.

End of history lesson.