Issuu

ﬁnger jam

volume 1

magazine

this page

2 letter from the editors

3 2/25 by kacey rebstock

4 journaling by mckenna ﬂekman

15 notebook by joshua catenazzo

16 brooklyn’s friendly neighbor by sophia caltagirone

17iJunky by cooper traluch

5 i kill two ﬂies every night before i sleep by lillian heckler

6 walnut by ilana diddums

7hire jaden matthews

9 the third station by jasmine sanatdar stevens

18 comic book by joshua catenazzo

19 my father the farmer, my mother the chef by lillian heckler

20 pottery showcase

21 can the nurses’ scrub ﬁt be rocked? by becky forbes

10 yusef by jasmine sanatdar stevens

22 crossword by ash reynolds

11 playing connect 4 with jabari elzie by lillian heckler

table of 1 contents



(letter from the editors)

Kacey and I often joke that we have one brain that we pass between one another. When one person is oﬀ, the other is on, etc., etc.. In the several-month process of creating Finger Jam, though, our skulls merged into one, forming a being that we fondly refer to as “The Associate.” For this reason, Finger Jam is truly a piece of both of us.

And Finger Jam extends beyond ourselves, too. It belongs to those who submitted to the mag, supported our crazy venture, and put up with our nagging text messages while we pulled our shit together. As a ﬁend for printed matter, there is nothing more gratifying than being able to present this to you now, a publication for you to ﬂip through and physically connect with.

All of my love and thanks to Kacey, McKenna, Andrew, my family, and everyone who consumed my Wattpad fanﬁction in middle school and inﬂated my ego.

We hope that you ‘ll join us as we continue to build our Finger Jam empire from the ground up. Don’t be scared to put your hand in the jar.

Finger Jam has been simmering on the journalistic stove for over a year. We canned that baby up and now you’re reading it. This newfound empire was born from a passion for the alphabet, found deep within Lillian, and a passion for making people wear silly things which lurches out of me. Within this twin union, the silliest determination to create something of our own is formed.

Thank you to everyone who stayed excited through these long months of teasing and taunting. To those who submitted work, offered to help, gave us advice and assisted us with executing our vision, we are deeply grateful.

The future of Finger Jam is long, painful, itchy and profitable, I talked to a prophet. Get in now. Lick that jam off your finger!

  2

2/25

by Kacey Rebstock

I’m studying abroad in London, well more specifically a town right outside of the main part of London called Sidcup at an acting school called Rose Bruford. Here are my days there so far:

The buses are double decker and everyone says cheers or thank you when they get off

Trying to find everything in stores. Things are different here. Cream cheese is called soft cream.

The city: tea and biscuits, shopping, pub, then a lady on a bike rode right into me and knocked me down.

Unfortunately I spent lots of time waiting at urgent care, but hey at least it’s free here!

Met everyone from school at The Ye Olde Black Horse, the main pub in town.

Went to see a football game. They are really into their football here.

You can just drink in public or on the tube at 1:00 PM and no one will care.

This school is different. I like it.

Having morning class is nice, after we go into the city Today spitalfields market.

Went to borough market underneath the London Bridge.

Everyone is incredibly talented in this program. They all work hard and it’s amazing to watch.

Class and then the pub: a regular Friday.

journaling from across the pond

by McKenna Flekman byMcKennaFlekman

Journeyed to Brixton, partied with the whole program, went to McDonalds (which apparently is better here), and walked all the way home at 3:00 AM.

Sundays are pretty quite in London, but I would just like to say that I walked 25,000 steps (yes some of that was from the walk home the night before but still)

Back in class and enjoying the refreshing new learning environment.

I miss my laundromat in Brooklyn.

Day off ! Went to Bristol: College Green, Park street, Brandon Hill, the river and the wharf.

Reading lots of plays for class.

Went to Brixton again for the afternoon... then went to The Box and saw drag performers, dancers on aerial silks, people swallowing swords and more.

I did watch the Superbowl I guess.

Walked over Tower Bridge and went to Camden market (there are so many bridges and markets here).

It is so much cheaper to get my nails done here.

Started rehearsals for the play that I’m in.

Time is going by way too fast, I love it here.

The next few weeks are gonna be as follows: rehearsals all day, sometimes 12 hour days usually ending at 9:00 PM. I play a girl who goes through a lot and by the end of the show I’m crying and all bloodied up so super fun! If it’s a Friday (or really any other day if we need some fun after a long day) we go to the pub! On the weekends I might spend the night in the city. But I’m super excited for our shows. Come to London and see me act my ass off !!

i kill two ﬂies every night before i sleep

by Lillian Heckler

The only insect I fought in my New York City apartment was a ﬂy in my bedroom at 2 AM after spending about six hours rewriting an article into something my professor would probably hate even more than the ﬁrst draft.

It was the first fly I had seen in months and the first I had ever tussled with in my apartment. At home in Pennsylvania, though, I was used to the sounds of a low buzz and the flick, flack of a fly’s fat body against my gabled ceiling.

Four years ago, a fly infestation took over the window closest to my bed. They would swarm there, licking off the sweat from the window with their long tongues. I would walk up slowly, silently, with a copy of Binge by Tyler Oakley raised above my shoulder. There was something quite satisfying about the fact that these flies were to meet their end at the hand — or more accurately, the face — of a mint-haired twink who made his fortune off of filming YouTube videos in his living room. My window frame was slathered in miniature organs by the end of the first week.

No matter how many I killed, though, they continued to reproduce (likely on my window frame while I slept; just the type of low-class behavior I’d expect out of them). And it seemed that the ﬂies became more agile. They would slip past Tyler’s shit-eating grin, buzz around me in circles until I could no longer track them with my gaze, and then disappear into the void.

This was not okay with me.

I continued my tactical training, learning the pace of the ﬂy, and becoming one with their habits. I would lay as still as possible on my bed, staring at a blank phone screen, tricking the ﬂies into believing that I was nonchalant about their existence.

And then, when they least expected it, I would pounce, Tyler Oakley and all, with a SMACK that could break sound barriers. It worked about 40 percent of the time. I tried fruitlessly to come up with a new method of destruction to guarantee the other 60 percent, all while the ﬂies took over my bedroom and started to borrow my socks and use my ﬂoss.

Until one night, when fruitless quite literally turned to fruitful.

I was eating cherries out of a ceramic bowl, untangling their stems, crushing the red, swollen fruit between my molars,

and then spitting the pits out into the graveyard at the bottom of the bowl. I lifted out a plump one, feeling the tension beneath its skin aching to be released. As I broke into the flesh, I heard a seizure of buzzing coming from above me. Warily, I turned my attention to the nipple-reminiscent light that hung from my ceiling and watched as several flies emerged from the slit in the fixture and barreled toward me with round bellies and legs tucked into their chests.

To my absolute horror, one landed on my perfect cherry. I watched as his tongue unfolded and began to pierce into the pink fruit, watched as he claimed my prize as his own. I couldn’t move.

He buzzed something of a sound of approval, encouraging his entourage to come taste. They followed his lead without hesitation. I stared with wide eyes as three flies tongued around my half-eaten fruit, nested between my pointer finger and thumb. They were so peaceful, so innocent. Enjoying a meal together, perhaps as a family. I had never been allowed so close before, a trio of flies mere inches from my face.

And then it hit me.

I had never been allowed so close before. A trio of ﬂies mere inches from my face.

I kept my right hand steady as I reached for a tissue with my left. And, in one swift movement, I killed the family feasting on my fruit, feeling the satisfying pop of their little bodies beneath my ﬁngers, like tapioca balls full of juice.

I felt a rush of power my body, straightening my spine and electrifying my limbs. I dragged a chair toward my light, where ﬂies darted in and out of the ﬁxture.

And then I stood, with my right hand raised toward the light, delivering my

apioca ower ﬁll ard

by Ilana Diddams

get this man a job!

(insert image of jaden being enthusiastic)

playing connect 4 with jabari elzie

by Lillian Heckler

Photos by Zach Bergren Styling by Kacey Rebstock

Clink, clink. Clink. Fwooosh. Plunk.

There is a faint tinkling noise as the red and yellow chips make contact with one another, sliding down the shafts of the 42-spot grid. They’re almost like gentle bombs, sent careening down from the heavens by a meticulous hand. Each disc settles uneasily on top of the previously played chips, as if afraid to look around and see where it ended up.

Jabari’s expression is serious. His stare is intense — jaw set, mouth neutral. He scratches the back of his head, then his ear, and then rests his hand on his sweatpant-clad leg. He alternates between staring at me and the unﬁnished game in front of us.

“I’m a two-time state champion at Connect 4,” he told me, nonchalantly slipping it into our conversation a few minutes ago. The board game was readily available to him — summoned as if by magic from a shelf underneath his television — right when he mentioned it. He challenged me to a game.

“I beat him before,” Jabari’s girlfriend, Yumi, called out from her position on his bed. He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you did. Once out of 56 times.”

“And you’re still good?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, his eyes holding mine with the severity of war rather than the simplicity of a game, “I’m extremely good.”

Jabari Elzie, born in Delaware and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a powerhouse performer and rising jack-of-alltrades. He has written several plays, directed and starred in a oneact at the New York Theater Festival, modeled in multiple fashion campaigns, directed music videos, and organized a major event in New York City for emerging creatives. His list of achievements is jaw-dropping considering that he’s only nineteen years old, and he has no plans of stopping.

“Right now I’m trying to get more, work harder,” Jabari said, sitting with his legs crossed on his bed. His pose reminds me of dance classes in 2008, gathered around our instructor with our hands on our knees and our noses stretched down to our toes. Our teacher tells us to close our eyes and ﬂy anywhere in the world — Jabari chooses the stage every time.

He attended art schools for his primary and secondary education and started acting at eight years old. “I always gravitated to performance and comedy,” he shared, “it’s a natural thing in me.”

“[In my ﬁrst show] I was a Shepard and I improvised a joke about McDonald’s. There were probably hundreds of people in the theater. And everybody laughed. I was like, what the fuck?” That moment on stage is when everything clicked; laughter and crowd interactions became the fuel to Jabari’s well-oiled machine.

Jabari is now a second-year Drama student at the College of Performing Arts at The New School, having graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts pre-college program in 2022. He is one of the only Black men in the department.

“As I got older, the theater started to become more of a white space. I wasn’t accustomed to it — and they weren’t accustomed to me. I was so used to [Black] talent and expression. I don’t think I would’ve gotten as far as I did if I had grown up doing theater with white people.”

“White people aren’t the problem or anything. I understand that white people are going to dominate the spaces I’m in,” he said. “Unless I create those spaces for myself — which I’m doing.”

On one July night in the summer of 2022, nestled into his bed in his Brooklyn apartment, Jabari created one of those spaces: Minstrel. A satirical one-act play based on Ain’t No Mo’ by Jordan E. Cooper and The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe, Minstrel questions how white people tell, and twist, the stories of Black people.

“I watched this video about how minstrelsy is common in modern-day media. It mentioned Iggy Azealea and Akwaﬁna, and I was like ‘Huh, that’s interesting.’ And then I watched The Color

Purple, and I saw that it was directed by Steven Spielberg, which I found really weird.”

In all of the media that he consumed thereafter, Jabari noticed the idea of minstrelsy in the 21st century more and more. “I thought to myself, ‘If this question was asked 20 years ago, and it still exists, how can I revamp it and make it my own?’ And that’s where Minstrel came from.”

“I wrote it in one night — 10 P.M. to 6 A.M.,” Jabari said with a small smile. “And now it’s in the New York Theater Festival. I’m pretty proud of myself.”

He doesn’t gloat, though, or even really acknowledge the magniﬁcence of his accomplishments. Jabari downplays his successes, acting like all he did was make you a turkey sandwich, not win an award, or write multiple plays, or direct a music video. And his graciousness is part of what makes him such a powerful force — you can’t help but root for him, to ask him to do more just so you can sit in the audience again and soak in the radiance of his talent. So you can tell him one more time how much potential he has.

“I don’t realize it when I’m in the middle of doing it, but then once I step out and look at it from a more objective point of view… Yeah, I do a lot.”

Jabari isn’t alone in his ventures, either. Behind all of the majesty of opening night are hours of work put in by friends and family. Minstrel employed more than a dozen emerging industry professionals, many of whom were talented members of Jabari’s inner circle. “I work with my friends because it makes the work itself fun,” he said. “You have to have fun while you work because then it produces fun work, which people enjoy more.”

Many of Jabari’s major creative projects were forged directly from those “fun” work sessions. He formed Panda, a sketch comedy group and YouTube channel, after transferring to UNCSA and realizing that two of his friends would work well with one another. “I met Alex [Thornburg] in the ninth grade. He’s the funniest person I know. Then I switched schools and met Davin [Shim], and I was like, ‘Davin and Alex need to meet.’ I knew that they would get along perfectly, their humor is so speciﬁc. Then we made Panda — ‘cause we’re Black, white, and Asian.”

Jabari has an intuitive feeling about who he can and cannot work with, and his friendships usually follow those guidelines. Because so much of his work builds from the relationships he has with his teammates, he gravitates toward those who have similar working behaviors and goals. THE EXXHIBIT, an art exhibit, concert, and fashion show hosted by Jabari, is supported by Yumi, Ben Stedman, and Liam Talasnik, three of the closest people in his life. Creating community and sharing success is central to his creative process.

“It’s so clean in here,” Yumi said as she maneuvered around Jabari’s room, sliding her backpack onto the ﬂoor next to his bed. His head quirked to the side at the sound of her voice. “No, it is always like this,” he countered mechanically. His eyes remained warm despite his hardened voice, his shoulders relaxing in her presence.

“Jabari is upfront. He’s very open, very outgoing. He knows what he values, which is really respectable—” (“Compliment!” Jabari interrupted.) “Yeah, okay. He’s very secure in himself. He knows what he’s looking for; if there’s a project that needs to get done he’s going to get it done.”

Yumi and Jabari met in their ﬁrst year of college and immediately clicked. Their shared passion and dedication to reaching their goals brought them together and now allow them to continuously push one another toward success. They have shaped each other in every facet of life.

As Jabari and I play our game of Connect 4, she watches from over his shoulder. I can practically see the wings unfolding from her back, the golden aura emanating oﬀ of her skin and settling peacefully over Jabari’s, taking on her role as something like his guardian angel. The corners of her lips turn up slightly and he eases, some of the tension in his jaw dissolving.

I slide my third to last chip onto the board — yellow, lucky — and watch the game come to a close. “I let you win,” Jabari asserts as the discs settle. I smile. He probably did.

by Joshua Catenazzo

brooklyn’s friendly neighbor:

the birdman of fort greene

by Sophia Caltagirone

The Birdman strolled into Fort Greene Park with two black African grey parrots on his shoulders. He walked along a path and sat his birds down on a rock.

As jazz music played, he sat down on a nearby park bench and watched his birds from afar. A couple walked by him with their dog. His eyes widened and he swiftly pulled out a bag of dog treats. He bent down and fed each dog a treat while chatting with the owners.

“That’s just an example. Everybody knows me, and all the dogs in the park, they all love me,” he said. Another dog began to make its way over.

David Reyes, the Birdman, is Puerto Rican born in the South Bronx and has been living off of Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene for the majority of his life. He retired from National Grid in 2020. Reyes has brought his birds to the park for the past 30 years.

The birds and Reyes’s presence is a free experience that served as an attraction for families with kids; he played a part in bringing people to the area, he made connections with other bird owners, and his comradeship to the dogs in the park allowed for small connections to be made.

Reyes’s birds, Chauncey Gardner, 35, and Spencer Gardner, 16, are black African grey parrots that he had raised since they were in an egg. They both have a 300-word vocabulary and cognitive skills.

“The birds tell me when they want to go to the park. They understand what the park is, and they will tell me when they want to go home,” said Reyes.

Sunny Jain made his way down to the rock with his kids and their friends from a group event on the other side of the park. “He’s super friendly with the kids and giving the kids a great, great fun experience. Which is kind of nice, it’s not like after you do it, it’s like ‘great, okay you can Venmo me here,’” joked Jain.

His kids and their friends were laughing as Reyes placed a bird on one of their heads. When the bird was closer to the group, some of the younger girls started to gasp and pull themselves away.

As quickly as they pulled away, five-year-old Margot DeMille came sprinting over to the chaos. Alex DeMille, 43, is Margot’s father, lives half a block away, so they come to the park often.

“I first moved to this neighborhood in 2009; it’s always been a wonderful park,” said DeMi-

lle as Margot climbed on the rock to see the birds.

Margot tried to feed the birds with the nuts Reyes handed her. The birds, said DeMille, are “a magnet for children.” Reyes then put a bird on Margot’s head. DeMille’s eyes were uneasy, so Reyes quickly reassured him, “Don’t worry, it won’t bite.”

Margot laughed and interrupted Reyes and her father, demanding that he take a picture.

“No, do a video!” said Reyes.

DeMille pulled out his phone and did just that.

“There’s a lot of love around here because of the birds; there’s a tremendous amount of camaraderie. It’s good for the birds and it’s good for people,” said Reyes to DeMille.

“I think this is a beautiful thing that you’re sharing with the park here. I really, really appreciate it,” responded DeMille.

Two little boys ran over when they saw the bird on Margot’s head. Their parents Natalia Sandoval and Alexandre Martin-Rosset began to watch their boys play with Margot, and the birds.

After Reyes asked, Sandoval told him she was Mexican and Martin-Rosset said he was French. Reyes was delighted that different groups of people coming together and his birds could bring happiness to them.

“We are looking to move to Fort Greene. I love the community here. It’s as close as you can get to nature in the city. It’s wild for our kids to be able to hang out with these birds,” said Sandoval.

Their boys continued to laugh and play with the birds. One boy ran around the rock with Margot, as the other boy jumped off as one of the birds followed.

“I don’t know if Dave realizes, but I’m sure we’re going to talk about this for a long time. It’s something that will impact us and it’s great with the community,” said Sandoval.

As Sandoval, Martin-Rosset, and their kids began to leave, out-of-towner Andy Swick came up to see the birds. Swick has a black African grey of his own.

“They’re amazing because they tend to be one-person birds, but he’s taught them to trust other people which is good. I think it makes the kids appreciate the birds. But also, the birds can live to be like 80 years old and so at some point they have to go to somebody else,” said Swick.

Reyes knows that the birds might outlive him. So in his will, the birds go to his family in Florida.

“Certainly anything that sort of disrupts the status-quo is a way to bring different groups together, and conversations that would not have normally happened,” said Fort Greene local Miquela Craytor.

Reyes’s neighborly attitude and compassion allowed for many small connections to be made, which is all he really wants.

“Someone like him is the type of person that makes New York so special,” said Craytor.

illustration by McKenna Flekman

iJunky; or, the evolution of the modern day trainspotter

by Cooper Traluch

When under the influence of a strong marijuana binge, a user’s green-hazed trance can only be broken by the pitter-patter of running rodents. Lucky for me, I got on the subway already, and remained on pace to meet some friends near Central Park. This indica odyssey started earlier, at the local weed shop. 15%. I distinctly remember one part of my conversation with the clerk. Something like, “So, you been binging any good shows recently,” to which he responded, casually and cooly, “Nah man, too busy trappin’,” which seemed like an odd excuse for a lack of television consumption, but who am I to judge? 14%. Still, as I sat on the sticky subway seat, my focus changed to the lady sitting across from me. Her elegantly fishnetted clubwear paired with a silk mini dress. 13%. I started to note the irony in my current state. I had seen the green-eyed before, the ones with the hazy gaze. They lurk stations and train cars under a veil of intoxicated subduedness. Had I become a new member of their three-leafed clan? Was I under the hazy gaze right now? Did others view me as one of the underground crazies? Am I sitting normally? 12%. This self-perceptual moment, interrupted momentarily, as a man nearing seven feet barged into the train car. Holding a reusable Target bag, he yelled one phrase repeatedly, “Perfume wands.” 11%. Who was this magician selling his

wares? Why did he have a tattoo of the Argentinian flag on his neck? I wondered if he had to sell his magical instruments of scented technology in this unconventional method due to the scarcity of high-paying employers who approve of neck tattoos. 10%. Ahead of me, the silk sultanness shapeshifted. I got goosebumps. Her silk minidress had been replaced with a full body coat and her face had aged dramatically. Who was this lady? A demon sent to watch my every move! 9%. She noticed me looking at her, so I pretended to look at the advert hanging behind her. It seemed wildly pornographic. Has this become the norm? Was I desensitized to the sight of a lingerie-clad model sucking a red lollipop? I had seen this advert before, though I never noticed how radically explicit it might seem to a passenger forty years ago. Wait, do I look like a pervert? 8%. How long have I been staring at this advert? I turn to see a man sitting next to me. How long has he been there? My peripheral spots his current state. He’s on Instagram editing a photo to post. The photo looks like a stock photo of some flowers. 7%. The type of thing you see on a default laptop screensaver. This seemed like such an impersonal thing to post on Instagram. I wondered who followed him. What would they think of this post? My attention got diverted as a caveman walked past me. 6%. He had a nose piercing and wore an American Eagle shirt, but nonetheless, a historically accurate Neanderthal. 5%. Well, if your historic reference is those old caveman Geico adverts. 4%. Fuck!

There’s a burning sensation against my thigh. Is this what Richard Pryor felt when he burnt up?

3%. It’s my phone. I left it on in my pocket. My phone battery is almost up. 2%. The modern fight or flight response: A phone about to die. I text my friends and ask where they are in the park, so I can meet them in case I won’t have my phone to call them there. 1%. After a brief momentary silence on their part, I get a message back. A dropped pin in Central Park. East of Wollman Rink. 0%.

we commissioned a comic book

by Joshua Catenazzo

my father the farmer, my mother the chef

by Lillian Heckler

I grew up surrounded by the smell of wet dirt. I practically bathed in it. I would sit by my father in the bright, damp warmth of the greenhouses and dutifully scoop composted soil from a trough into trays of twoinch pots. He stacked them on a plastic card table and slowly worked through them, sprinkling seeds out of packets and pressing them down with his dirtied fingers.

I remember my mother, her knees stained dark with soil, crouched over rows of vegetables in the field in front of the barn. She hacked at the clayey dirt, tugging carrots out of the ground by their green tufts and slicing lettuce free with a steak knife. It was a treat to watch her in the garden. The early summer sun would lap at my scalp like a dog, and I’d run down the rows, arms outstretched, pulling cherry tomatoes and sugar snap peas off of their plants and popping them greedily into my mouth. After a while, she’d come to gather me, a basket of vegetables on her arm. The rest of the afternoon would be spent in the kitchen, peering over her shoulder as she washed, chopped, and prepared the vegetables my father had planted months ago. She was the sous chef at a private French restaurant, a snotty one with a horribly conservative head chef and chickens that ran around inside the kitchen. Half of what my father ordered for the growing season revolved around my mother and the new recipes that she wanted to try, ones she stole from her boss and others that she concocted on her own.

understood how to balance the various elements of a dish, a skill that most individuals went to culinary school to develop. Each elaborate meal came out better and more inventive than the last. But there was always one thing that I looked forward to the most, that my body instinctively craved at the beginning of the summer.

Sliced thickly, slimy with olive oil, and garnished with flakey sea salt, I was obsessed with grilled zucchini. My mother would make it in large batches from the plants that sprouted endlessly in our backyard. She’d toss the slices in pepper, salt, and oil in a massive metal bowl, place piece after piece on the grill, and let them rest on the grates until they were charred.

I was always in awe of what she created, the sauces and salads and desserts that she developed with seemingly little effort. She inherently

While they cooked, she’d pull up a plastic lawn chair and sip a short glass of white wine while I kneeled in front of her on the brick patio, tearing weeds out from between the stones. After each slice finished cooking, she’d place it back in the metal bowl, and I’d swoop in to grab it before it had time to cool. I never needed utensils. I was perfectly content plucking the hot slices directly from the bowl and slurping them like a snake swallowing an egg whole. The best part was sucking my fingers of salt and oil after eating each piece. In those moments, in the greenhouse with my father and by the grill with my mother, I was as much a plant as a girl, as closely related to a sizzling slice of zucchini as a human can get.

illustration by McKenna Flekman

ﬂippery pottery

good earth collection, vases

rag bowl, bowl

artichoke, bowl

a middle-aged mother expresses herself through clay

rodney runs away from sunburn, platter

slice of heaven collection, vase and platter

can the nurses’ scrub ﬁt be rocked?

by Becky Forbes

Although bound by rules and regulations, policies and procedures, fashion-minded nurses can still find creative expression in their day-to-day work wear. Scrubs, as the nurses’ uniform has morphed into being, generally resemble pajamas or prison wear. But it wasn’t always so. At the inception of nursing as a profession through the 1980s, dresses with white aprons and hats were the accepted uniform. Perhaps the changed mirrored the entry of men into the field. Prior to that time, men were generally doctors and women nurses. And, of course, it would be silly to ask a man to wear a dress. The appearance of scrubs was seen first in the operating room where cleanliness was penultimate, and doctors preferred light clothing under sterile gown. Drab and strictly utilitarian in their form, scrubs were generally oversize, green, shapeless and held up with a drawstring. Now scrubs range in form resembling joggers to cargo pants. And the fashion-bold still sport old-time dresses. This article invites you to journey with a nurse into a day of scrub fashion in the Emergency Department.