"Hat Day." Separately, I'm fine with those two words. Together, I hate them as much as I hate anything in this world. Here's why:

I was a loser in junior high. No other way to describe it. I had my share of friends in grade school and was pretty okay with the world at large, but my mind and body decided to enter its awkward stage on the first day of the sixth grade, and stayed that way until I got to high school. I was goofy, round-faced, inadequate, and worst of all, I wore terrible clothes. Like, knockoff Skidz pants with Syracuse Orangemen t-shirts, which I only wore because I thought the orange mascot was cool. People would ask me who my favorite player was, and I couldn't even tell them what sport the Orangemen participated in.

Junior high was the most miserable time of my life, and I could tell you a thousand hilarious stories about my tremendous social failures throughout it, but they aren't relevant to this particular story. I just wanted you to have some context before I tell you about a little old thing called "Hat Day."

In the seventh grade, our teachers informed us of the upcoming special event known as "Hat Day." On this day and this day only, students were allowed to wear hats during classes. They told us that those who wore the most creative, extravagant hats would win prizes. While I usually shied away from anything resembling the spotlight, something clicked.

So I went home, grabbed a gigantic cardboard box, taped it to a cumbersome construction hat and fashioned myself a hat version of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. This thing was hideous. Two feet tall, bulky, with casino highlights crudely drawn on in crayon. Fourteen rolls of scotch tape liberally plastered all over the hat. I was pretty proud of it at the time, and because I falsely considered "Hat Day" more like a skewed version of the yearly science fair, I boldly entered the courtyard...with a cardboard Trump Taj Mahal on top of my head.

And what did I see? What products of the artist's mind had my fellow students worn? 500 baseball caps. I was one of maybe a dozen students who made wacky hats, and of them, my stupid casino resort was by far the largest, corniest and most absurd. It took all of three seconds for everyone in sight distance to point and laugh, and it was only going to get worse from there.

Because I was one of very few students with a "creative" hat, and because mine was the size of a Ford Taurus, I was selected as one of the big winners. Would I win a new television, or maybe free tickets to Six Flags? I couldn't wait to find out.

Forget the televisions. My "reward" was a special "Hat Day" assembly, in which the ten kids with the best hats got to march in a circle up on stage in front of a jam-packed auditorium of laughing classmates. For like ten whole minutes, we just stood there walking in circles, trying to fight the tears as we struggled to keep our stupid, cumbersome hats from falling off. Aside from being forced to practice my nude robot dance on national television, I can think of nothing more embarrassing.

Upon returning from school, I didn't even make it into the house before kicking and ripping my Trump Taj Mahal hat into a zillion pieces. As I recall, I convinced my mother to let me stay home the next day, in the hopes that by the time I got back to school, everyone would've forgotten that they'd last seen me getting dizzy onstage with a cardboard hotel on my head. They did not.

Oh, I did get one small tangible prize aside from the glory of being a sideshow attraction at a school assembly. They made me a button.

I really, really hated "Hat Day."

Posted by Matt on 06/29/2007. E-mail me!