There are days I think I have entered the Twilight Zone. You remember the show with Rod Serling narrating some bizarre event. Here I am a graduate from high school in the late seventies, and that was a very distinctive time in the world of fashion. We were so cool in our hip-hugging bell-bottoms and tight shirts that barely covered, if they did, our midriffs, and the size of our shoes. I personally had a stepladder, which I used to climb on top of some of my open toed, platforms back then. And how about those clogs, we all had them and wore them a lot even though the weight of carrying them on our feet each day would wear us out.

Well here I am 40-something and working in a high school. But as my eyes scan the teens pushing and shoving their way up the busy halls, I see the bell bottoms (excuse me that's flares) and the platform footwear even one's sneakers can have four- to six-inch souls. The girls are back to tight shirts that don't quite meet the pants. The fellows haven't gone back to the tight pants of my teens, but less and less underwear are showing, which I think is a plus. (Those of you still showing it, get with it. That look is leaving.)

Have the 70's somehow returned and I missed it? Here I am back in high school; maybe I have actually passed back in time. No that's impossible, and the teens don't look anything like my classmates. When they start looking like them then I worry.

In all fairness to the teens of today they aren't totally copying the teens of the 70's even though the peasant skirts and mood rings are back. The teens today have added their own twists; for instance some of the girls with the midriff showing are also sporting bellybutton rings. I just have one word to say for them - OUCH! Watched one girl who, after getting her bellybutton pierced, had to keep moving the ring around and around the hole so it would heal properly, and she wasn't the least bit embarrassed to do it in school.

On the subject of piercing, everyone in my day, I mean the girls, had pierced ears, and our radical move was to wear two different earrings. Today many have their ears pierced several times, or their eyebrows, or their lips, or even their tongues. UGH! I will never understand how they put up with the earring. I mean the one in the mouth must make everything taste like metal, provided the piercing did not kill the taste buds.

The guys aren't wearing their hair long yet either, but some do have bones or barbells in their ears. Forget the tiny hole, let's make a large passageway, which actually stretches the lobe, an idea adopted from some African tribes.

My grandmother used to say when it comes to society, "the pendulum swings back and forth." In the seventies we started wearing shoulder pads and form fitted two- and three-piece suits, very much like styles of the 50's. Give it another 10 years and the poodle skirt may be back.

As for those of us stuck in the middle, I just wear what I like and ignore what I don't. Being the older, more mature adult allows me this right. Don't have to worry about my peers anymore.