The owl dress

The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat .. I think that’s how it went ..

My thoughts at the time were , why was the owl in the boat with a pussycat ? And why did the cat not eat the owl? I was always a macabre child.

But owls and cats have always been very symbolic in my world , I remember finding a dead barn owl outside our house on Barnstable Road, had our cat Pepper killed it , had it died naturally.. hard to tell . But I drew it for an art project when I was 12. “Dead Owl” pencil sketch by Karen aged 12, my art teacher was concerned. But his bad outfit was more concerning to me, bad tight corduroy trousers and a pointy collared shirt in a bland tan and a sweater vest, I was already a fashion critic. Plus he was creepy. And his eyes lingered on the certain parts of young girls' bodies, he disturbed me. Maybe that’s why my art drawings had become darker , maybe it was a way of telling him to back off. Still he wrote a note for my long suffering mother , explaining that my subject for art was a bit alarming . I just turned to her and said it’s not like I was drawing willies. I was not a very nice daughter.

I was also determined to get back at the art teacher so a few days later I carefully took the dead owl feathers I had collected and stuck them with glue to a piece of art he had done. It was mean but I was 12 , plus in my opinion it improved his art. He was not to see his masterpiece defaced , as he never came back to school. I secretly hoped something bad had happened to him..

I think owls or birds in general mean new beginnings, I read somewhere if they fly into windows it can foretell death..

I remembered the owl dress I brought. It was the first dress I got with my own money from a trippy shop in the nearest town Leicester. The shop was full of crystals and clogs, fringe and fur vests , dayglo paintings and was scarily inviting. I think this purchase was before the drawing of the dead owl. It was a mini dress in Orange with a weird print. , at first I did not notice the owls they were hiding in the flowers. It was a happy dress, I was trying to embrace the sunny hippy side of the 70s, not my weird awkward side, plus I had discovered boys and was trying to dress like the fashion magazines of the day , BIBA , OZZY CLARK. I would wear it to the youth club, it was a bit short and my mum would not let me wear makeup. But I had just started wearing a bra and felt very grown up.I wanted the boys to notice me, they were more interested in the older girls.

I was invisible..

That’s when I had first observed how the art teacher who was supervising the teens at the youth center, would act around the female students. His hands would linger on the girls shoulders, he would smile, but he had such a bushy mustache it looked like a hairy caterpillar dancing on his lip to my young mind. Now I could see behind the mask of his smiling dancing mustache, I knew he was a bad person. I felt safe in my hidden owl dress , it felt like a magic dress. It had given me the ability to see how the art teacher was and in my imagination I had the power to fight the evil lord. I envisioned the owls flying off the dress , wings spread wide ,swooping and attacking the teacher pecking out his eyes and taking them and placing them at the abused girls feet, which were wearing the most amazing pair of patent red platform shoes.

I had not taken LSD , I just had a very over active imagination and I wanted the art teacher gone.

And later as if the magic owls had heard he vanished , never to return to the school. Had he died in a violent way I hoped. I never really found out if he violated any girls from my school, but I like to think it was the power of the owl dress that vanquished him.