NY Catholic high school in the 80's. How many times did YOU roll your skirt?

You haven't truly lived unless you survived Catholic high school.  Now I know all you public school graduates will argue this point to death.  Filling my ears with stories about how rough it was, and how bad ass you had to be.  That may be so, my fellow NY'ers. However, you did it in clothing that YOU chose, and you didn't have to hide your badassery from priests and nuns.  We win. Nothing compares to being forced to dress like a dork in school as a teenager trying to come into your own, and take the city buses to get there.  Try getting on a crowded bus wearing a maroon kilt that had a giant golden safety pin, tights, and loafers and see if you can avoid the stares and nasty comments from the PUBLIC school kids. That's right, it was you who made our lives a living hell travelling to and from school.
We had such a mutual dislike going on between the Catholic school kids and public school kids in high school.  Maybe we were a little jealous that you could wear whatever the fuck you wanted.  Although, that begs the question, why did you dress like homeless people if you were given a choice???  Many of you looked like nobody's child, while others looked like gang members, some like streetwalkers, and a fair amount like crack heads. Now I've pissed off a ton of you.  Guess what?  Tough shit.  Didn't bother you when you made fun of us on the bus, did it?  Didn't phase you when you egged us and the passing buses were rode on Halloween, did it?  Didn't bug you at all when you tried to lift our skirts while boarding the buses behind us.  We fucked you there...we all wore shorts underneath.  Public or private, all boys that age are pigs.
This is not to say that the whole experience sucked balls.  It didn't. We managed to have fun in ugly skirts, two sizes too big even after the uniform company measured all of us. We just rolled that bad boy up at the waist and rocked the hoe-bag look.  Not necessarily a bad thing, every guy fantasizes about dirty school girls.  But coupling that sexy (excuse me while I change underwear, I may have peed myself saying something as ridiculous as that) skirt with a collared shirt or sweater seriously detracted from any sort of attractiveness we may have attained by rolling it up 5 times.  That and the oh-so-sexy tights we all wore with the flat shoes we were required to wear.  I suppose they had a clue about the dirty school girl and helped us take it down a notch with dorky shoes.  We did attempt to add the cute factor back in by wearing slouched socks over the tights, sometimes two alternating pairs in complimentary colors.  Are you gagging yet?
What we did that set us apart from even the *ahem* individuality of the public school girls, is we seriously fucking rocked giant hair.  I kid you not, we had enormous hair and were damn proud of it.  The higher the better.  In retrospect, and we all know that hindsight is 20/20, we all would have been wise to buy stock in Aqua Net.  Every girl carried the mega-sized can of Aqua Net in her bag. Later to be replaced by the genius invention called Stiff Stuff, but I digress. It was our badge of honor, our pass into the secret society of girls.  Hair that looked like a teased lion's mane or even better, a teased and permed lion's mane was how we expressed ourselves. And express we did, loudly and with great volume!
Walking into the bathroom required a gas mask to assist in breathing while stepping through the hairspray fog that seemed to be constantly in there. How else could we achieve our signature look?  Really big hair, bangs curled under looking like a hairy coke can on our foreheads, and maybe the most important and defining part, the pieces of side and top pulled back with a butterfly clip.  But wait, that's not it.  After we pulled those strategic pieces back, we then yanked the hair forward using four fingers shoved into the hair until there was the BUMP.  The bump which had to be larger than life and sprayed till it looked like it had been professionally shellacked.  And you thought Snooki invented it? Balls.
Girls with massive hair required some serious makeup.  Thick black eyeliner that came out to points on the top and the bottom lid giving all of us exaggerated cat eyes was just the beginning.  We layered on mascara on our lashes until it looked like two tarantulas died on our faces.  Thick foundation was applied until you could write with your fingernail on our cheeks. We completed this glamorous look with big, pink glossy lips. Vogue should have had us on their cover for the years spanning 1984-1988.  We were the epitome of 80s fashion, or so we thought.  Laugh all you want, you bitches are just jealous that you didn't come up with it.
Boys had other challenges with the uniform.  Plain navy pants and a collared shirt, even if they wore a sweater.  Seemingly easy, or so you think.  If you were a woody, which is what we called the rock/stoners, it was a piece of cake. Plaid flannel shirts were all collared and button-down.  Problem solved.  If you were nerdy, even easier.  But if you were a guido, heaven help you.  How the hell could you rock your look without the prerequisite wife-beater (we called them guinea Ts) and Sergio Tacchini jacket? Seriously, what the fuck was the majority of the male population in my high school supposed to do?  Solution:  wear a ton of gold jewelry.  Open that motherfucking collar up, and dangle three or four thick gold chains from your neck.  Make sure you had at least one cross, the horn, and perhaps a saint or two hanging from those chains.  That covered the religion part of the program.  But no self-respecting cugine (koo-zheen for you non-NY, non-Italians) would be caught dead without the gold Playboy bunny hanging from one of those necklaces.  The same Playboy bunny symbol that graced the locks on their Cadillac doors, but again, a whole other topic.
Thinking back, I suppose we all wore way too much gold jewelry.  Rings on almost every finger, necklaces filled with charms and charm holders to carry the load of all those baubles, bracelets, earrings.  OK, we were tacky...but we made it look good!
Dressing to impress in Catholic high school was a challenge.  We met that challenge head-on, and hair-on daily and with style. We took what could have been a fashion nightmare and turned it into something we could actually wear with minimized embarrassment on the streets of Queens.  We made being Italian into a fashion statement, one that even the Irish girls adopted. Our look was even imitated on the Jersey Shore, don't believe for a second it was created in the 2000s by Jersey girls!  Hell to the NO!  It was born in Catholic high schools in Queens, NY, thank you very fucking much. Am I glad I was a part of it?  You better believe it.  Looking back at my yearbook, would I want to repeat that look today?  Are you friggin kidding me right now???