When I Find Waldo, Imma Beat Him With His Jaunty Cane
My older brother, Uncle Aunt Becky, who is ten years my senior, is still angry with my mother for dressing him in striped shirts for most of his childhood. Knowing my mother, she probably did try to stuff him into those hated striped shirts until he was well into college, so maybe he does have a point.
My mother gave me The Bangs that started at approximately the crown of my head and ended in a straight line at my eyebrows. The Bangs used most of my hair. The Bangs are the reason I shuddered when I saw that bangs came back into fashion a couple of years ago.
I cannot see bangs as anything other than The Bangs and I’m constantly terrified that a wandering pair of scissors is going to accidentally cut my hair into The Bangs again.
Uncle Aunt Becky, I don’t share your hatred of stripey shirts, but I totally get it.
Alex has made it abundantly clear that he’s all Sherrick (my middle/maiden name) and with the exception of the albino-translucent-don’t-let-him-in-the-sun-lest-he-set-on-fire-like-parchment he’s no “Harks” whatsoever.
Being a “Sherrick” means that there is only one way that things are done and that is the right way and if things do not go that way, you will simply poke-poke-prod-poke until they are done that way again. The PROPER way. If we eat ham on Easter, we’ll eat motherfucking ham every Easter until we have motherfucking PORK poisoning and it doesn’t matter if you hate ham, or if EVERYONE hates ham because we eat motherfucking HAM on motherfucking EASTER goddammit so you better get used to it!
I am *ahem* slightly less rigid than this (shut your whore mouth, Pranksters) but I certainly have quite a bit of Sherrick in me, too.
Alex, however is a miniature version of my brother, Uncle Aunt Becky, minus the vampiric skin, of course. Uncle Aunt Becky is swarthy like Your Aunt Becky. I attributed a lot of his Sherrick-ness to being a toddler until I realized that actually, you can’t breed that shit out. Like the poo jokes he makes. Alex is 100% Sherrick.
(Man, I know I’m just making you all want to come to my house for Christmas. “NOW, it’s time for YOU to tell a fart joke, Uncle Aunt Becky! YES YOU!”)
Last night, I was ordering some cheap-ass clothes from the Old Navy website. I’m generally not a fan of disposable clothes, but I’m still losing the baby weight (thank you, my children for helping me pile on a fuck-ton of weight while barfing my brains out), and Old Navy is perfect for these sorts of things. Plus, I had a coupon, and buying things with coupons makes me happy in the pants.
So I was adding some fall clothes for me and I figured I’d be nice and grab The Daver some t-shirts while I was at it.
While I was looking at their men’s clothes, I saw that striped shirts for men were back in vogue.
Your Aunt Becky: “Uh, dude, weird. Striped shirts for guys?”
The Daver: “What?”
Your Aunt Becky: “Yeah, Old Navy is selling striped shirts for men.”
The Daver: “Really?”
Aunt Becky: “Steve from Blues Clues ruined those for grown men.”
The Daver: “Ha, yeah.”
Aunt Becky: “Although, he’s got to get a lot of soccer mom ass.”
The Daver: “Maybe if I wore them, I’d get a lot of soccer mom ass.”
Aunt Becky: “Or maybe you’d look like Waldo.”
The Daver: “Touche.”
Alex: “I want a striped shirt.”
Aunt Becky: “What?”
Alex: “Will you get me a striped shirt?”
Aunt Becky: “Uh, really?”
Alex: “Yes, please. May I please have a striped shirt?”
(he thought I was asking him to ask politely)
Aunt Becky: “Ooookay, baby. I’ll get you a striped shirt.”
Alex: “YAAAAAYYYY!”
This morning:
Alex: “MOM! WHERE’S MY STRIPED SHIRT!?!”
Aunt Becky: “Uh, you were serious?”
Alex: “Yes please.”
Aunt Becky: “REALLY!?!”
Alex: “I would like a striped shirt from the store.”
Aunt Becky: “I can’t wait to tell Uncle Aunt Becky.”
Now, if Amelia wants bangs, I may have to have stage an Intervention.
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Poke-poke-poke-prod-poke. CHARITY POSTS. I rewrote the intro for the Fans of The David Cook who have been finding their way here, confused and alone.
If yellow, tattersall plaid, or green, hound’s tooth pants show up anywhere, just shoot me. Yeah, mom apparently thought I didn’t go to school so much as work in the circus. Perhaps I should have taken the hint.
I thought bright green corduroys were bad. But you? Those are fucking memories.
I’d scan a picture in, but honestly, I’m too horrified.
Seriously, I am opposed to The Bangs. Sunshine’s hair is always in her eyes. My mother wants to trim it. NOOOOOOOO! Then she will be stuck with The Bangs! Then she might wind up an adult with a time warp hairdo with The Bangs, ’cause she’s convinced that she needs The Bangs to cover her imagined HUGE forehead. Not that I know anyone like that. (cough, cough … my sister and my cousin)
You letting them pick out their own clothes? Eventually, the boys want to wear pants with the top of their boxers showing and the girls wear pants that show the tops of their thongs/ ass cracks when they bend over. Speaking as a mom who had 3 kids going through adolescence at the same time. I should have been more of a my way or the highway type mom.
Maybe I’ll start doing that. GOOD CALL.
i had my hair cut last weekend and now have the bangs again. they are sideswepty bangs i suppose. but bangs, none the less. i think i look kind of cute with them.
of course, the hot pink and neon orange of my hair tends to draw attention away from the actual style. so there is that.
Those are the hot kind of bangs. Mine were cut with (no joke) a piece of tape to make them even and straight across my eyebrows. HOLY AWFUL.
I thought I was the only person alive who hated The Bangs. They terrify me. I never want to see bangs again on me or my children. I would rather go bald. Now as far as stripped shirts go, I joke with my husband and really anyone around my age, that EVERY kindergarten picture of boys born from about 1974-to maybe 1983 It is various different colors but it’s a striped shirt with the alligator on the left hand chest. And the white collar. I have yet to see a picture of any boy my age that didn’t have that shirt on. And you know they had corduroy pants on in a matching color to the shirt.
My husband LOVES striped shirts. They make up a huge portion of his wardrobe.
Stripes are the gateway pattern. Next he’ll be asking for dots, and then *shudder* paisleys… and he won’t even GET that they look like MOTHERFUCKING SPERM FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Bwahahahaha! They TOTALLY DO look like spermies! Bwahahaha!
Oh dear lord.
You effin’ crack me up. Steve from Blues Clues ruined stripes, but Joe on the other hand made me feel a little wrong for wanting to watch the show for reasons other than educational.
I know you are all famous, with your John C. Mayer-ing and such, but I do have an award waiting for you over at my humble little blog.
http://seriouslyreallyseriously.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-gotz-me-award.html
Your wit needs more acknowledgement, and through you I found other funny blogs, too.
Awwwwwwww, blues clues. Puh Pao!
Oh, the Bangs. I had (still do, actually) the fivehead and my mother would Scotch Tape my bangs and then cut them to make a straight line. The line was straight…but diagonally straight, if you know what I mean. Complete tragedy. I’d share a pic except they were all burned by the government as part of the Cold War.
My 3 yo is having a love affair with his red shirt with the red buttons. The red shirt with the white buttons and the red shirt with the red buttons with the tastefully thin stripes and the red shirt with the cute Yellow Submarine-esque drawing of a submarine will not do. It can only be the red shirt with the red buttons.
YES! YES! YES! That’s EXACTLY what she did to me, too! No nice sideswipey bangs. NO. I got the STRAIGHT ASS AWFUL bangs.
Weird, I always associate striped shirts with Freddy Krueger.. ick. I can’t even talk about how much that stupid show traumatized me.
LMAO! I worked with someone whose poor children had “The Bangs” Theirs also started east and west of their ears. It was more like a mullet than The Bangs.
I need some bangs though because I have a five-head. *sigh*
Cheeks insisted on The Bangs a couple years ago because her BFF had them. I tried to dissuade her to no avail. She got The Bangs. She hated The Bangs. I almost bit my tongue in half trying NOT to say “I told you so”. Striped shirts? Cenzo hates them – hallelujah!
Havoc has always loved stripes, the narrow kind, mixed with the wide kind, not the ‘all the same size’ kind. Due to my insistence on wearing hand me downs for as long as they fit, that means Mayhem is stuck with stripes no matter how he feels about them. I don’t think he likes them much because he only wears them when nothing else is clean. Which in my house is far more often than he would like.
I’m growing out bangs now. AGAIN! My life is divided between periods of bangs and periods where I decide to grow them out but give up around the time they reach past my nose but STILL cannot be tucked behind my ears. I just never get past that stage
Oh, The Bangs! I had them for my entire childhood. The growing out of The Bangs coincided nicely with my awkward stage, which also included a unibrow, horribly crooked teeth followed by braces, and an unfortunate neck injury that resulted in three months in a neck brace. Yes sir, I was one hot adolescent.
The bang has been presented to me as a solution to the natural toddler hatred of the hair clip.
I will let her walk into walls before I cut my girl a pageboy.
I’m thinking of shaving Amelia’s mop into a mowhawk. Thoughts?
The bang has been presented to me as a solution to the natural toddler hatred of the hair clip.
I will let her walk into walls before I cut my girl a pageboy.
My daughter INSISTED on getting bangs (and she is a Princess of the World like her mother and gets what she wants, damnit), and all I can say is that I hope this is just a phase and she realizes, sooner rather than later, that bangs are total bullshit.
Bangs are motherFUCKING bullshit. This comment cracked my ass UP.
Well, guess the fuck what, Aunt Becky! MY mother made SURE that I would always WANT bangs by pointing out my freakishly high, alienesque forehead! So she not only traumatized me…SHE MADE ME LIKE IT! Now THAT’S mad skillz right there.
Oh The Bangs. I had The Bangs. When my mom would fix The Bangs, she curled half down onto my forehead and half back onto the top of my head. So The Bangs added an extra few inches to my height.
Ah, yes! The Bangs mate with a curling iron to produce THE SUPER BANGS! I still see these on Branch Davidian/ Mormon off-shoot home-school victims all the time! You know you got it right if you can drive said girls through a car wash and the bangs retain their AWESOMENESS because of the huge amount of hairspray used. SUPER BANGS ROCK!
I had those bangs too!my mom cut them at the back of my head and curled them higher than Everest. *sigh* the eighties. they sucked. took me 20 years to get over my fear of bangs.
side story: when I lived in France, I had this friend who wore this red and white stripey shirt all the time. oh, and a scarf too (no jaunty hat though). but in France, it’s not Waldo (of course not); it’s Charlie. so everywhere we went, French kids would point and shout: ou est Charlie?
I had the horrible uneven bangs, which were chopped shorter if they even looked like they were thinking about touching my eyebrows. Now, I have no bangs, and my mother STILL complains about “all that hair in your face.” My daughter has no bangs. My husband and MIL gave them to her once, but were forbidden from further abuse by his sisters (Thank God!). And, my mother, since she liked the kind of child abuse that only left mental scars, also dressed me in most awful 70s fashions. I had afternoon kindergarten, and my oldest sister was in 8th grade at the time. One day, she saw me in my class (but not before school, because she was at school when mom dressed me) and practically had a fit. She went home and yelled at my mother that she was never again allowed to dress me in plaid pants (I think they were also patchwork) and a striped top. Because it was embarrassing for all of us.
Oh the endless striped shirts of boys. It’s like the designers went completely mental on all the girl stuff spending hours and hours creating options, and then they got to the boy stuff and just went … ummm, stripes. Just do all stripes. Your description of the bangs made me laugh. The crown of your head you say? Hot.
worse than The Bangs? growing out The Bangs. In 4th grade and in time for school pictures. It was better than the Dorothy Hamil I was growing out. After that? My mother was able to convince me a perm would be a good idea. White girl afro with grow out of The Bangs? I’m surprised I didn’t get beat up. Luckily, I was taller than everyone. I’m sure that was all that was saving me.
He probably would get a lot of ass… Too bad he’s DEAD.
Way to be insensitive Aunt Becky.
Man, I really am an ASS, aren’t I?
Also: Urban Myth. Steve’s alive and well and banging soccer moms galore.
Or dead and hanging with Paul McCartney.
I actually looked him up on Wikipedia the other day. (don’t ask) He quit Blue Clues to pursue his music career. Of course he did.
One wonders if the “We just got a letter, we just got a letter, we just got a letter, wonder who it’s from??!” can be discerned beneath the heavy metal guitar riffs?
The point is, if he wasn’t banging soccer moms before, he is now FO’ SHO!
He’s still not dead. No matter what Twitter or Facebook says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Burns
That’s it. I’m done believing my sister. Everything she tells me is a lie (ok, I have no idea where I heard it from. But I’m still blaming my sister).
My mother insisted that I have bangs when I was little too. However she was in denial of my curly hair, so when she cut them she would do it for the hair she wished I had, resulting in bangs that shrunk up to the top of my five-head.
LoL… “Uncle Aunt Becky” is still cracking me up!
You better get that kid a striped shirt or he’ll be pissed all his life and never wear anything BUT striped shirts. This is how it works.
Uhm. What’s a five-head?
higher than a FOURhead.
Brilliant! Thanks!
Uhm. What’s a five-head?
Dude, I had those bangs from all the way on the back of my head with the mullet, cut super straight, and then my mom decided to PERM those bangs. Not the whole head, just the bangs.
That Alex is so handsome! Does he still wear his cuppy cake shirt, too?
Hello, new follower from http://becauseidontscrapbook.blogspot.com/. This is the most hilarious post!! I too suffer many paralyzing flashbacks when I see girls wandering down the street in legwarmers and “The Bangs”. The other day my mom did my daughter’s hair and tried to do the whole curl and fluff with hair spray thing, which I’m sure you are now picturing in your head. She almost had to use smelling salts to revive me!! Thanks for the chuckle!
Oh Aunt Becky, I jut wanted to share my latest post with you. If it weren’t for the John C. Mayer Project, I would never be as awesome as I am today!
http://badbadwebbis.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/john-c-mayer-level-1/
I love striped shirts on little boys. No doubt my two will be whining in years to come about their pirate-inspired childhood. My mum dressed me in orange for about 100 years. I was a redhead (orange hair), living in outback Australia (think orange dirt), wearing orange stripes. It’s a wonder they didn’t lose me forever.
i’ve always wanted those really cool straight across bangs that some of the hipsters have. then once i got them i realized my hair is wavy and i just look like a dufus. since i can’t rock them, bangs can suck it.
Your son is awesome!
At least your mom didn’t make Uncle Aunt Becky wear argyle sweaters. So at least a little of his manhood was preserved.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! I’ll remind him of that. VERY GOOD POINT.
Waldo ain’t got nothin’ on your little champ.
Alex will beat Waldo into submission. By sheer annoyance.
The concept of Steve from Blues Clues getting ANY female ass is counter-intuitive.
Oh, and Waldo? Adorable. Funny, I remember him looking more like Christoper Mintz-Plasse.
He really did. And yeah, Steve looked like an overgrown toddler.
I still love Steve from Blues Clues, despite the striped shirt. Don’t know that I would do him though. And I am glad he’s not dead!;)
Bert and Ernie also have the striped shirt thing going on.
when I was in HS we referred to any cute guy as “Waldo” (long story) so when “Where’s Waldo” came out my friend and I bought each other tons of waldo stuff, including buttons that said “I’m a Waldo watcher”
This post fucking rocks. I too have a five head and I am a bang head. It just can’t be any other way. My forehead is HUGE!! Film at eleven on Kristtie’s forehead. I love my bangs…sweeping down to the left… dangling a little over my eyes. Peek a boo! I scare myself soooo bad when I put a hair band on to wash my face. It is a huge source of shinny flesh staring back at me. . I ask my parents why they effin did this to me! Who does this to a child?!! Cheese!