Mad Drip and Hockey Sticks

Recently, thanks to blogging buddy Mitchell of Moving with Mitchell, I learned a new-to-me Gen Z slang term -- "mad drip" which means "excellent [fashion] style" apparently. Mitchell posted an old photo of himself and his sister Dale wearing the latest 1959 fashions (see it here). In my comment, I said --

Yes, you and Dale had mad drip indeed! I see Dale was wearing white bobby socks and black patent leather Mary Janes that were de rigueur at the time. When my Mom dressed pre-schooler me for Sunday School, I wore those too with a similarly puffy-skirted dress — but mine was pink, I’ll have you know, as befitted girls. Hahahahaha! I should do a post with a couple of incriminating photos of me in girly-girl drag.

So here's those incriminating photos now.

The date stamp on the photo's border says "FEB 60" but clearly that is NOT February-in-Canada weather, lol. The date stamp references when the photo was developed, not when it was taken, which must have been in the summer of 1959. So I was two years old.

I suspect this photo was taken a year or two later when I was three or four. Different dress but the shoes look the same. Given how fast kids grow, though, they must have been different ones. Probably the last time I wore a crinoline too. I remember putting up a huge fight against those damn scratchy things and refusing to ever wear one again.

Left to my own devices, this next photo shows what I preferred to wear. The cowboy hat was my brother's and usually I also wore his gun holster set of toy six-shooters, but my mother must have prevailed to leave those out of the snap that day.

Now, what's all this about hockey sticks?

See the white picket fence in the first photo and the white trellis in the second? They were both made from the shafts of broken hockey sticks. At that time, my father worked for Municipal Services in the town in which we lived. One of his duties was to work at the municipal ice rink in the winter. A lot of hockey sticks got (and still get) broken by players during games. In those days, sticks were real wood, not fibreglass or carbon fibre like today. My father got permission to take the now-discarded broken sticks home. He trimmed them into various lengths, sanded them, painted them white, and made them into our picket fences and trellises. He was imaginative and talented with carpentry skills that way.