With a thong in their hearts

By Doug Thompson
September 29, 2002

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Anne Garvick’s 16-year-old daughter came home early from a dance last week at Rancho Bernardo High School near San Diego.

Turns out the vice principal, a self-serving moralizer named Rita Wilson, sent her daughter and others home from the dance for wearing thong panties.

And how did Ms. Wilson know the young women wore thongs?
She made them lift their dresses to show her, and everybody else standing in line to attend the dance, their panties.

“Everyone saw everything,” said 15-year-old Rancho Bernardo student Kim Teal, who was not checked. “It was a big peep show.”

Wilson also made other female student unbutton their blouses or dresses to prove they were wearing bras, giving leering high school boys something else to keep their hormones raging.

This didn’t sit to well with Garvick, who complained to school district superintendent Don Phillips.

“As a parent myself, I certainly understand the concern these allegations have raised,” Poway Unified School District Superintendent Don Phillips said. “If these allegations prove to be true, the actions were clearly outside our school district’s policies and procedures.”

Phillips placed Wilson on administrative leave, pending investigation of her conduct at the dance.

“She needs to be fired,” Garvick said. “And if they don’t fire her I’m willing to file a lawsuit. My daughter has already told me she doesn’t want to go back to Rancho Bernardo if (Wilson) is still there.”

Other parents say their daughters say the same things.

Garvick says she doesn’t really care what kind of panties her daughter wears and woldn’t embarrass her by asking.

“Underwear is, and should be, a private thing,” Garvick says.

Not all of the sweet young things attending the dance got the “lift your skirt” treatment. Overweight girls passed without inspection. Wilson said overweight girls usually don’t wear such skimpy undergarments, which should come as a real surprise to Bill Clinton, who got the hots for the less-than-svelte Monica Lewinsky when she flashed her thong at him.

Wilson told some parents she decided on the thong check because she observed some girls at an earlier dances twirling around in their short skirts and exposing their thongs to others.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never understood the appeal of thongs. Why any woman would want to go around with a thin piece of fabric jammed up her ass escapes me. From a male point-of-view, I also find thongs unattractive, perhaps because – contrary to what Ms. Wilson thinks – too many of those who sport thongs would be better off in control top pantyhose.

Mrs. Gavick, however, is right. Underwear is, and should remain, private.

Had young Lewinsky kept her thong to herself, we might have been spared 18-months of watching prime time newscasters find other ways to describe oral sex.

Rita Wilson should lose her job. Her actions at the high school dance were, at the least, a gross invasion of privacy and her impromptu peep show could be called pandering and child pornography.

Let’s hope Superintendent Don Phillips sends this self-appointed guardian of morality packing. For a going-way present, he can give her a package of sensible panties from Wal-Mart.