Rewinding some twenty odd years, we visit Mr. Davidson’s grade five class.  He was a smidge eccentric with his wild tufts of reddish-orange hair, tinged slightly with white, and somehow managed to keep a seemingly endless supply of various dried fruit (papaya, pineapple, ginger) in his top drawer as a reward to well-behaved students.  During our year with him, we studied, hatched and raised birds (chicken and quail) in a classroom that smelled unmistakably like a barnyard.  

Focused on the arts, he assigned us graphic collages to create and spiral-graph designs to color, each of which he would proudly laminate and frame for us.  Beyond that, we were required to write an autobiography of our truly fictional future lives. 

At ten years old, I wrote of my sprawling estate, luxury automobiles and celebrity husband (namely, Tom Selleck, who fathered our four beautiful children; two boys, two girls).  While his acting career continued to keep us in the lifestyle that we had grown accustomed to, I produced literature worthy of deep sighs, a few tears and a smiley-finish. 

The imagination of a child is a truly marvelous thing… and, sometimes, if we look hard enough, we can find truth in fiction.   It’s just too bad that Tom Selleck was already married!

There is something that has been gnawing away at the very core of my being, a teeny, tiny piece of information that will leave you reeling.  I can no longer hide behind my bulging closet of clothing and accessories, nor behind the pile of shoes that is certain to be taller than I am.  I have to confess something that may alter the way you look at me forever…

I was once entirely fashion-dysfunctional. 

Pairing reds with oranges and layering horrendous knits under a furry cow-patterned vest, I was a walking eye-sore, sure to have made small children cry.  My idea of peep-toe shoes equated to wearing my Birkenstock-like sandals without socks.  (I cringe in re-reading that last sentence)

Though able to identify the flawless faces of the classically illustrated models that blessed the glossy pages of Vogue and Glamour, my knowledge of Fashion Houses were limited to the floral fragrances in which they offered.  To me, fashion-forward meant an exciting shopping excursion to a neighboring city where, perhaps, the selection of overalls might be slightly larger than that within the boundaries of the small town in which I was raised.  I was anything but feminine, refusing to adorn my teenaged body with something that could suggest I had developed a shape beyond that of a rectangle. 

However thankful I might be that photographs of this sad, ill-dressed girl haven’t yet surfaced on Facebook, I sometimes wonder how she got from there to here. 

Here… a place where walking by Coach and Jimmy Choo have left me breathless… a place where little black dresses no longer frighten me into wild hysteria, a place where I am the proud owner of the most stunning pair of pearly white Chanel stilettos that ever were.  I am reformed.