My daughter attends an international school, this week they will start preparations for the yearly school cultural fair and my daughter’s classroom was selected to represent the West Coast of the United States (plus Alaska and Hawaii, how stupid is that?).
I was hoping for a really interesting country (sorry American dopers, but the novelty has worn out), instead we get this. There’s nothing we can do that most kids won’t already know. Besides, who grouped Utah with California and Hawaii with Alaska? Gee people…
Anyways, I have to come up with a costume for a girl and a boy. Cowboys and Indians are overdone, and frankly a little cliched. I want something, I don’t know, authentic but not overdone. And something I can sew on my own. I thought of recreating the American Gothic picture, but Iowa is not included in the list of states, for obvious reasons.
So, American dopers. Any suggestions, other than marching back to school and demanding we be reassigned a cool country?
A grass skirt, a Hawaiian shirt with pot leaves on it, a parka with seal fur, a plate of whale blubber, a save the whales sign, a surfboard, a PETA protest sign, a rifle and survival wear for the Washington isolationists. Shit how do I include the Chinese and Japanese ethnicity? Maybe a pair of wooden sandals and a robot. Line the committee against the wall, because this is impossible.
That’s about the only thing I could think of. White sunscreen on the nose, too, and of course sunglasses.
The whole nature of California is that you can’t really pin down any one “traditional” kind of clothing, unless you want to go back to the Californios (Spanish style ranchero dress), which nobody would understand, or some kind of Native American dress, like the Tongva or Kumeyaay. California has always been the home of the rootless.
I’d say you can’t take such a conflicted task seriously. Still… one boy costume, one girl costume, and the rest of the class will be doing other bits of left-coast culture that you don’t take on.
Do the girl up as a surfer chick (works for Hawaii and California), and the boy up as a forty-niner miner. Paint some of the nuggets silver and some gold, and you’ve covered both the California Gold Rush (maybe the Klondike Gold Rush as well) and also Nevada’s Virginia City silver boom. Or probably don’t try so hard to cover so many things here. You can’t, there’s too much here.
