Sue Spaid

Endless Dresses. Fortunately, I have a lot of bizarre photographs left over from my childhood, but none provokes more astonishment than this “family portrait,” shot in 1971 on Christmas morning. Pictured here are my maternal grandparents, my dad, mom, two sisters and me. Four gals appear to wear “God knows what?” Mom selected this hyper-floral cloth and hired a tailor to craft these “day-gowns” patterned after “thobes,” the national dress for Saudi males. Much seems incongruous here: two men in central Pennsylvania wear short-sleeve shirts in December; four heads stride a floral blob; the Barbie outfit and Koala bear in each sister’s hands vanish into this flowery sea; my sisters’ left and right feet touch as if they belong to the same person; and my fluffy orange slippers cut a diagonal to my dad’s peach shirt. Back then, mom used to dress us in matching outfits whenever we traveled. We were her “American Girl” dolls.  However, it was very unusual for mom to come up with such a crazy, free-spirited look. Most of our “yoonyunforms,” as we jokingly called them, were monochrome, so that shirts, pants, and vests easily matched. Luckily, she meant for these gowns to be worn indoors, so we never had to troop around the globe dressed en masse like this. Otherwise, strangers might have surmised that we were members of some religious order/cult or that our conformist parents had maverick propensities!