There was a guy in grade four named Joel who was the coolest kid in my school. He had an undercut - an undercut with trax! He had the most awesomest happy pants - the kind that would make MC Hammer wet his knickers. He strutted, with steely gaze, the mean pathways between the tuckshop and the little oval. His chilling 'tude would send the girls swooning for a pash, and the guys gushing for a chance to get invited to sleep over and play on his Atari Lynx. It couldn't get any cooler - and then came Kris Kross.
The morning was like any other. We'd gathered behind the toilet block, taking the cash out of our lunch bags to substitute the maternally planned "Salad Sandwiches" for a more wholesome packet of Toobs and a Breaka Milk. We just sparked up a couple of "Big Boss" cigar candies and had thrown the morning's first marbles when we were distracted by a blinding light. Our eyes surely couldn't be deceiving us... This image of beauty and perfection can only be real. The eyebrows of the coolest kid in school were shaven in a holy alignment of trax previously unknown outside of the glitz and bling of the inside of Kris Kross cassette booklets.
For one brief day Joel, the coolest kid in the universe had transcended the clouded and futile cool of the material world and entered the universal cool normally reserved for gods and celestial bodies. Maybe you think I'm over exaggerating, but if you've never seen eyebrow trax in person, you'll never understand.
The story doesn't end there however. (Tragically they never do) Joel, like Jesus before him, was shortly thereafter crucified by a society which didn't understand him. After his mother shaved his eyebrows completely off that evening, forcing him to go to school with mascara eyebrows, Joel was sentenced to spend his remaining primary school days hanging out with the nerds and weirdo's. (Yeah us) The collapse of the global HappyPant industry followed soon after.
All we have left to remind us of that golden age are those rare 57 minutes when we miss the bus