As girlie as I was in the 80s...

I just could not stomach unicorns.

Seriously. My sister, my best friend and I made fun of the subculture of girls who bought unicorn figurines and fantasy airbrushed posters from Spencer Gifts. We called them "purple girls," as they usually wore purple unironically and we weren't that good at coming up with subtle cracks back then.

My daddy took the three of us to see "Legend" at the movie theatre and the showing was filled with purple girls. "Oh, come on," I said way too loudly during the unicorn scene, when the poorly affixed horn wobbled on the horse's -- sorry, the "unicorn's" head. "SHHHHHHH!!!," the purple girls in the audience hissed at me. There were way more of them, so I piped down.

A decade or so ago, when I was in my late 20s, I found the greatest tee-shirt ever at Hot Topic (because I was totally underground at bought clothes at the mall Goth store): It was purple, had a picture of a unicorn shooting a rainbow from its horn, and the words "Unicorns are stupid."

I freakin' loved that tee-shirt. My Sainted Southern Mother saw me wearing it once, asked me to stand still so she could read it, and replied, "Yes. They are stupid."

Because I have been lucky enough in my career to never be beholden to a dress code at work, I wore it to my job. I was trapped in the elevator one day with an example of the Peter Principle who was way higher up the food chain than I was and she commented on the shirt: "Well, they aren't around anymore." And I could only smile politely.

Around that time, I had decided that the funniest thing in the world was to give myself fake names at delis as I waited for my order. "Leigh Ann," after all, though it is only two simple syllables, can be spelled 15 or so different ways and spelling it out is tiresome. So I renamed myself the funniest name I could think of. "Brandi, with an I," I always told the person at the counter. Comedy genius, I thought.

My grownup best friend invited me to a party in his neighborhood one night years ago, and I wore the shirt. It was a huge party, so we had to fill out name tags on the way in.  I wrote "Brandi" on mine and we made our way into the party, passing through the den, which featured a very elaborate, bone china unicorn as the centerpiece.

"Oh, shit," we both thought at the same time. I stuck around long enough to have a couple of drinks, crossing my arms over my chest while dodging the host and hostess, then ducked out, claiming babysitter problems (for the children I did not have).

Still. Unicorns? Really?

I am extremely proud to write that our disdain for them runs into three generations of my family now. Two Christmases ago, my darling nephew Joshua used his Christmas shopping money and picked out the best present ever for me: