Stealth Care by Ruby Brunton

“Even today the sight of a pair of khakis turns my stomach”

Growing up isolated on the main island of a tiny country made up of three, far away from the rest of the world, it was easy to crave escape from the conformity of small city life. Interesting characters were few and far between; luckily I grew up with two of them, but I was always greedy to meet more. The glitzy, grimey, cabaret of the theater world I inhabited was at odds with the charming mundanity of small town New Zealand life, and when I wasn’t swept up in my parents’ latest projects, I was searching for that same feeling of excitement elsewhere.

As an adolescent, that meant wearing lime green miniskirts over bootcut jeans, getting drunk on ‘rocket fuel’ (a vile concoction of whatever was in your parents’ liquor cabinets; since mine did not drink much I was forced to ask for handouts) and watching movies my classmates hadn’t heard of with my worldly older friends. Forging an identity through film, costume, and attitude felt like the right way to go. Afraid of being bullied if I came off as “too different” but also not wanting to fit in, my escape from the school uniform was to don costumes from mum’s dress-up box after class. There were plenty of full skirts, polka dots, stretchy elastic belts, and square-shouldered blazers to recreate the core cast of any campy 50s musical. Friends loved to come by before Halloween, school discos, anything that required a dress-up. During those times, I felt a little less weird about my untraditional upbringing and could see the benefits of having artistic parents with expansive imaginations and boundless curiosity for everything that existed outside of the mainstream, instead of being embarrassed by them as I usually was.