Bagels & Cream Cheese and the Moschino Girls

While going to school in NYC, it always felt like I had the least amount of money out of everyone there. I showed up to school with my beaten up Levi jeans and a couple of worn out t-shirts. I worked two part-time jobs while at school and still couldn't afford to drop a dime on a new outfit. I remember someone saying to me, "I just love that you don't care. I love that you just dress that way and don't care what everyone else thinks of you." I didn't know what to think when they told me that. I remember being very upset about it for days and crying on Katy's shoulder about it. Katy always made me feel better about everyone at school.

My daily budget while at school was about $2.00. Mom would send me care packages with things like ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese, cans of tuna and soup. I used what was in the care package for dinners and spent my $2.00 on lunch. Usually, I would just get two cheeseburgers at McDonald's and wait to eat them until I got home so I could have a glass of water with them. Occasionally though, I woke up hungry. On my way to school I would be tempted by all of the carts of food on the street. I could manage to resist until I reached my destination and I would ultimately splurge on a hot chocolate and a plain bagel with cream cheese. Total- $2.00. It was .75 for a hot chocolate and $1.25 for bagel and cream cheese. This, to me, was the best deal in all of New York. The bagel was fresh and plump. If you have never had an NYC bagel, they slice their cream cheese from a giant slab and just give you the slice. I remember the cream cheese slice being about an inch deep and more than covered the surface of the bagel. Sometimes you would get more cream cheese than bagel. The hot chocolate, well, it was watery, but had a lot of sugar in it and did the trick for someone that didn't drink coffee at the time. The thing is, if I spent the $2.00 on the bagel and hot chocolate, I would know that I could not eat lunch. It was a trade-off and somehow I would justify this purchase until about 3pm when my stomach started growling and I would kill for something to eat to the point where I would wrestle someone to the ground for a Jolly Rancher. Sometimes I had a little bit more than $2.00 and I knew that I could buy something like a banana or apple at the deli on the corner to get me through lunch.

I would walk into class with my bagel in a paper bag and my hot chocolate in my hand. Now, there was a group of girls that always seemed to be dressed to be on a runway. I referred to them (and still do when talking to Katy), as the Moschino Girls. They didn't just have the Moschino belt or Moschino jeans, they had a closet full of Moschino and wore the outfits as they were shown in ads on the pages of Vogue magazine. Moschino is definitely one of the designers that I would think you would not want to wear head to toe, as it ends up coming out a little over-done. Especially at 8am on a Tuesday. But these girls never failed to show up wearing an outfit that costs a million dollars. I specifically remember one girl wearing an outfit one day that was all black. She had on a t-shirt; long, black coat; very tight, black pants that flared out at the bottom; boots with a very high heel; and a gigantic silver belt, with a buckle that was about a half foot wide and said MOSCHINO in capital letters. When she turned around, I saw that her outfit read MOSCHINO in white all down the back. Just when you thought she might be wearing another designer and was just dressed in all black. Nope. Moschino- all down the back of her jacket and jeans.

I remember the Moschino Girls huddling in a group and staring at me. In my t-shirt and Levi jeans. The looks they gave me were probably just them looking over the room, but to me, as insecure as I was back then, they looked like they thought I was the biggest idiot for not wearing designer clothes and eating a designer breakfast. They would share breakfasts that I could only dream of eating. One of them would bring beautiful chocolate croissants, another would have a beautiful platter of fruit and the other would bring individual bottles of juice with names I've never heard of before and extra fancy bottles of water. Surely all of this was purchased at a city deli, but to me, it seemed a little extravagant. Perhaps if I had more than two bucks to my name, I wouldn't have thought so. I definitely got used to making fun of the Moschino girls and couldn't wait to get to school to see what they were wearing. To this day, whenever I am eating a bagel with cream cheese, I imagine them looking over at me as if I was the scum of the Earth in my beat up clothes and cheap breakfast. I always thought it would have been fun to show up to class wearing Moschino like they did and then an hour into class, have a caterer show up to deliver a 7-course meal.