Op-Ed
Confessions of a Teenage Civil War Reenactor
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Awkward Turtle
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Lara was what my mom called, “in need of a hug from Jesus.” My Type A football player of a brother called her “deranged,” but I knew he secretly wanted to get in her Jncos. If life was directed by John Hughes, she would have sat in the back left corner of the bus, burning lighter marks into her wrist and trying desperately to disappear behind her thigh-high military boots until high school passed. But every day she sat in the front next to my crew of kiddie-pop singing 8th graders. And every day, I wondered how she stayed so pale in the summer, if she used eyeliner or black acrylic paint, how much it hurt to push those safety pins through the extraneous skin of her fingers, and how the hell I could become her.
It was hopeless; I was lifting weights at age 12 as she spent her junior year lining the halls of our school’s basement with black and white paintings of Laura Flynn Boyle. While I searched through Express sale bins for any sign of polyester and sequence, she was sponsored by Amvets and Hot Topic, and any piece of her jewelry could cause a fatal puncture wound. While I arrived at school packaged in green tights and red felt brimming with crumpled newspaper (“I’m a Halloween tomato!”), she strolled in wearing a brown corduroy Gap skirt, Mary Jane Candies, and bronzer. Everything from the slightly deviant spelling of her name to the poetry about her middle-aged whiskey-breathed lover was mysterious, enigmatic, and heaps more rad than I could ever hope to be.
After Lara graduated, up to her choker in artistic accolades and without any apparent plans of college, I focused my borderline stalker admiration on Star. Star posted sepia photographs of herself wearing a tube top and mini skirt made entirely of lunchmeat around our hyper-conservative private school. Her real name was Bonnie Star, a name handed down through generations of her Amish ancestors. She was spending her Amish sabbatical in an apartment in downtown Buffalo, alone save frequent visits from her total babe of a quarterback boyfriend. You know, the quality of man that makes you fake injuries just to watch him ice bath.
One afternoon at the trainer’s, she stopped by for a visit while I was icing my plantar faciitis and ogling her man’s chest tattoo. He broke from sucking face long enough to remark that we looked a little alike. Like mine, her eyes were spaced apart far enough to inhibit depth perception and her lips were showed signs of ten too many make out sessions with the family HooverVac. She studied my face so long I broke out in that nervous blotchy rash that sporadically crawls up my neck, and simply remarked, “cool.”
I was anything but. After watching them make out until my voyeuristic needs were satisfied, I hurried home to pack the rented RV with tents, Yankee uniforms, and mounds of heavy cotton dresses.
It was a Civil War reenacting weekend.
One weekend of every month of my middle-school existence, my family trekked to Gettysburg to camp out with other reenactors as the men stuck it to them unruly Rebel units. The men of the AAA artillery unit sat around campfires drinking whiskey from canteens and exchanging fabricated war stories. Sister and Mah, both 5 feet in diameter, wandered the campsite forcing modern-day “civilians” to flee walking paths to dodge the wide load of their hoop skirts and the low hanging limbs of their lace-ridden parasols.
According to the Civil War seamstress whose dusty ear hair evidenced her ante-bellum birth date, I was far too young to rock the suggestive female shape created by six hula-hoops of steadily increasing radii. “Hoop skirts on a twelve year old? That just ain’t decent!” Heaven forbid a strong wind a-lift up my dress, exposin’ my pantaloons to civilians and soldiers alike!
According to the usual gender-bending pattern that worried my mother throughout my preteen years, I suggested that I become a drummer boy instead. At least then I’d have the opportunity to accidentally take down a rebel using my chain-linked drumsticks as nun chucks. Unfortunately, I lacked the three prerequisites for drummer-boyhood: rhythm and netherbits.
So, while my brother and father fired overgrown airsoft guns at charging Confederates, my mom and sister meandered the campsite looking 19th century bomb in their curve hugging forest green gowns with matching gloves and bonnets. I, on the other hand, was approaching 5’10 and a C cup in a light blue paisley onesie with floral-embroidered pantaloons and a matching doily pinned in my ginger-mane.
Night fell. While the civilians had had their fill of turkey legs and good old Yankee pride, the reenactors were just warming up. The days of playing tops with the local war-children were followed by nights of mock barn-raisings, as the reenactors would break it down to the contagious beats of spoons and the fiddle. While my sister was courted by many a uniformed young man, and my brother thought he was drunk on birch beer, I huddled behind stacks of hay, spooning my Gameboy like the last of a precious coke-stash, trying desperately to forget my crotchless pantaloons in Kirby’s Playland.
Our stint as Civil War reenactors suffered an abrupt end at a fashion show put on by the local army wives. As my mother and sister floated down the makeshift catwalk of collapsible tables, a woman on a civil-war era karaoke mic outlined the fashionable aspects of their garb. When it was my turn to work the catwalk, I dragged my feet like I was walking the plank – already drowning in ruffles, embroidery, and shame. I was at the mercy of the Confederate Tim Gunn as she stripped me from bonnet to pantaloon of my last ounce of flailing dignity.
“Shannan’s freckles would actually be considered highly unattractive in the 19th century, as they are a sign that she is used for hard labor outdoors.”
We never went back.
I hid my family’s secret hobby from my schoolmates like we were Russian child-bride smugglers. I would’ve given my first Gameboy for the coolness it took for Lara to dress up as a normal girl for Halloween, or for Star to wrap herself in Salami-wear and stare seductively into a camera. But, in retrospect, it wasn’t their strange habits that made them cool, but their willingness to go public with it. It sucks to be a closet weirdo, but there is nothing cooler than an enthusiastic freak.
Shannan Scarselletta is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at sscarselletta@cornellsun.com. Awkward Turtle appears alternate Mondays this semester.