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Flooze is fashion
for today’s girls

IT wasn't until reading Star-Bulletin writer Susan Essoyan's seminal piece on the flaunting of flooziness at schools that I realized what had been sorely lacking at my high school: "hootchie mamas."

We had girls at Aiea High when I attended who wore fairly short skirts with bikini bottoms underneath (so I'm told) but I don't recall chicks dressing along the "street walker" line.

That's changed today. High school girls are wearing fewer, not to mention, tighter, items of clothing then the "ladies of the night" I saw at the police cellblock 20 years ago while covering the crime beat.

According to Essoyan's exposé, so to speak, school girls who wear next to nothing -- and wear it so high or low as to barely conceal their charms -- are called "hootchie mamas" by less fashion adventurous classmates. Man, what my buddies and I would have given to have a few hootchie mamas prowling our campus.

Alas, now my buddies and I are what would be called "old fuddy-duddies" to the point that our old fuddy duddy hearts can't take seeing how the hootchie mamas dress these days.

The question is whether schools should have dress codes and the answer is, yes, students should dress to come to school. Dressing, according to the Old Fuddy Duddy Handbook, means girls should have more skin covered than exposed.

I'm not advocating the wearing of "one eye" burkas for high school girls but there must be a happy medium between Miss Saudi Arabia and Blaze Starr.

SPEAKING OF happy mediums, I suspect it would be hard for any jovial psychic to predict where female fashion will go from here. Unless co-eds begin shuffling into class with their pants around their ankles and their tube tops around their necks, there seems little left to release to the public. At least legally. Forget the hand-wringing by teachers, principals and anguished parents, if pants drop any lower and tops go any higher, I believe the Vice Squad will intercede.

Regular eaders may detect a whiff of jealousy in this dissertation. Hah. I would be the last to deprive pube-scent males of their classroom hootchie mamas. OK. You're right. I'd be first. But not because I was deprived of the presence of hootchie mamas during my education. I am merely thinking of these young mens' futures. They need to focus in their studies so they can go on to become stalwart, productive members of society. How can one concentrate on hypotenuses and hydrocarbons when hootchie mamas roam the landscape? It's just not fair to those young lads.