Christian Brothers Academy (CBA)
1999-2005
What did your uniform look like? We didn’t have a uniform where you had to buy it from a catalog. We had a dress code—it didn’t sound as harsh.
Did you like your uniform, or dress code, rather? Not so much. I went to a public school for elementary school before going to CBA for high school, and a lot of the other kids had gone to Catholic school before, so they were used to it.
So how did you adjust - going from wearing whatever you wanted in public school to having a dress code in high school? It was a lot of trouble because I was a tomboy—I didn’t like the girls’ flared dress-code khakis.
Did the school have a few days were you could wear whatever you wanted? Yeah, you could pay like 1 or 2 bucks to wear anything and the money would go to a big cause, like the tsunami.
That’s nice. And you must have been super excited to wear whatever you wanted, right? It was nice, but it was more of a novelty for kids that had been wearing the dress code clothes since kindergarten and had like 20 chances in their entire life to wear jeans to school.
But what about finally getting to wear your tomboy clothes? Well, I wanted to wear gym shorts, but Abercrombie and American Eagle were the look. And some kids set the tone for what everyone else was wearing. So even on a dress-down day when we could wear whatever we wanted, everyone dressed really similarly.
So it was like your class was still in uniform?
Yeah—you’d think they’d want to change it up a little.
