berkeley high had spirit week. it was traditional enough to end in a football game or dance or something, but my social cohort celebrated our school spirit in another way (irreverence) so the attention i paid it was only passing and incidental. i remember only two days of spirit week. one, the day on which we were all supposed to wear our school colors, was traditional and anodyne. the other was pimps and hoes day.

the history of "pimps up hoes down day," as it was formally (ahem) named, was never known to me, and i haven't been able to dig up anything about it now. i asked some peers if they remembered it, and they confirmed that not only did it happen, but that it may have been photographically captured in the spirit week section of the yearbook, although none of us had one handy to check. like all class days during spirit week, it was an opportunity for costumes, albeit non-traditional ones for a high school. the social dynamics of their selection were exactly what you'd expect from early-aughts berkeley teenagers: anybody could be a pimp (huge leather coat; ridiculous, fuzzy hat; stupid cane), but the "hoes" (mesh top; prominently visible thong) were all girls.

somebody with an academic eye (or at least lived experience as a teenage girl) could provide a better sociological analysis of "pimps up hoes down day" than i ever could. i recollect only another expression of student power against presumed adult authority. it is clear that the adults lacked not only formal input into spirit week's planning but also operational control over the classroom environment during it. berkeley high students, as always, demanded compromise. you can make the student spend 45 minutes practicing spanish vocabulary. you cannot control what she wears while she does it, and if you try, you will have to deal with her half-dozen peers who are doing the same thing. she does not just have a rhinestone-studded g-string. she has solidarity.

(to be clear, this was not a one-day-a-year special abdication of a normal dress code enforced normally, like a slutty the purge. this was an explicit exercise of student power that nobody ever really disputed. the other one-day-a-year Student Sex Thing was "senior streak day," an occurrence universally greeted by the adults with resignation, not reproach. the one dress code concession i remember my class making ever was when we were told that anyone not wearing clothes under their graduation gowns wouldn't walk, and even that was only accepted when we realized that the gowns' cheap thinness meant that hiding one's nudity for a maximally hilarious reveal was logistically impossible anyway.)

my sister, three years younger than i, has no recollection of "pimps up hoes down day," meaning it did not even survive to my senior year. i have no idea whether it predated my berkeley high tenure or was just some oddball single-year quasi-prank that got immediately squashed by adult authority - or simple good taste. whatever its full history, it's now just a fossilized memory of teenage post-feminism, or proto-feminism, or simple rebellion. i still want to dig up a yearbook to see if it's in there, though. it'd be wild if it were.