The Little Red Dress

They resemble us just enough to make all their differences confusing, and no matter what we choose to make of this, we are cast in relation to them our whole lives long. -Susan Scarf Merrell

While cleaning out my grandparent's house with my mom, my youngest brother went through all the old pictures and separated out  the pictures of me. He called this little collection of history the many hair-do's of Elizabeth. But I'm not quite sure that I'm ready to show you the progression of me in big hair through the 80's, culminating in what can only be described as a blonde afro ala Vanessa Huxtable. Maybe I'll show you when my hairstyles come back around and are vintage cool.

Foregoing the big hair show does not mean you don't get embarrassing old photos of me. I did find some pictures of some little girls in a little red gingham dress, and I'm willing to share because it totally takes the focus off me and you get to see photos of my sisters. I'm the oldest, so the dress was new for me. That picture was taken in 1975-ish.

I'd say that this is somewhere in 1977. This is my sister, Julie. We slept in pink sponge rollers the night before this was taken to achieve those fabulous ringlets. The dress I'm wearing is floor-length and has Sesame Street characters on the skirt. You can see Big Bird under my elbow. Pretty cute, huh? I wish we'd saved this one to inflict upon for LadyBug. I'm pretty sure that we went to the JCPenny portrait studio to have this picture taken.

And here we are sometime around 1985. There is a brother and a five-year gap between this cutie pie, Jill, and Julie. We used to dress my brother up in frilly dresses and a curly wig, so I'm not sure why we don't have a picture from 1980 of him in this dress as well. Jill is my twin-ten-years-younger. She is the shortest of the sisters, barely hitting 5'1" and 100 lbs. when soaking wet and has the darkest hair. She also slept in pink sponge rollers to get her curly 'do.

This is Robin and it is now 1988. She's got the same hair-do I had in 1975, but it looks like her pink sponge rollers fell out in the night. Either that or there weren't enough pink rollers to go around and since she was the youngest she couldn't stick up for herself.

I wonder what ever happened to the little red gingham dress? If we'd have been thinking properly about it, Julie's oldest daughter would have had her picture take in it in 2002 and LadyBug could have done a photo shoot in 2004. This dress vintage-y cool now.