Wow. Sorry. I know you are dead serious but your description of Michael's dress (albet accurate) had me in stitches. Yes. He was comical but I believe he meant it to be so. He is messin'.
My reply your comment about 'minimal adherance to a 'norm' however is this:
As I tried to say before, conforming to norms does not necessarily work. The 'minimal' keeps getting more and more narrowly restricted if it is allowed to. It then takes the work of one brave soul to open that window up again.
I worked a couple of semesters in an inner city school this last year. If I recall correctly, 80% of the students there came from families at or below the poverty level. Even so almost all of the students managed to wear 'designer' clothes and expensive name brand shoes. The style for the guys was also that godawful pants being held up by your penis style. The couple of kids who did not conform to this were outcastes and mercilously slammed for anytjing they did. One day the teacher for the class, who came to the U.S. from Jamaica, laid into the class about it. She gave about a ten minute speech to them about predjudice. She said that she had never known predjudice until she came here. She was black, I should add, and so was 95% of the class (that is called integrated, sic) but I do not believe she was referring specifically predjudices against blacks. At least in this case she wasn't. She said if they didn't like being treated with predjudice themselves they should not treat others that way because they were 'different' or didn't dress like they did. That what they were doing was no different and they should know what it felt like. I think it was one of the few times she was ever able to reach them.
The reason I told this story is that the kids that were picked on were not dressed in any outlandish way. They dressed as their parents could afford to dress them.
