It was a costume as rigid as the uniform worn by the U.S. Marine Corps on dress parade: jeans, cowboy boots, one pant leg tucked into one boot, the other hanging loose, and a shirt of a particular kind. It even included combing your hair a certain way.

Reading about that got me thinking of what was once my heart's desire as a teenager: a black wool belted overcoat.

Today I have no idea why this was the costume to be acquired by the male members of the student body at my high school, but it was. It was what we wore when we went to basketball and football games. I can't remember if we wore it to dances or not. Probably.

Looking back on it, it seems like an odd choice for California kids to want to acquire, certainly more peculiar than cowboy boots and jeans would be in New Mexico.

A wool overcoat in California, especially in a gymnasium during a noisy, crowded basketball game, is hot. It wasn't so warm sitting in the open bleachers that lined either side of our football field, but on most fall nights in California a wool overcoat was overkill to say the least.

Still, I desperately wanted one, probably because my best friend had gotten one somewhere. Wool overcoats, however, were not cheap, even in those days, so it must have cost my mother something to buy me one. But she was a good mother and in time she did. It had a collar one could turn up (like Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent) and a loose wool belt that could be knotted around one's middle.

I don't know, maybe we thought we were going to be war correspondents—World War II was fast approaching, although we didn't know that at the time.

We must have been quite a sight when we set off in my friend's Model A Ford, borrowed from his parents for the night. We swaggered into the gym because swaggering was a part of being 17 years old. I suspect now that no one saw us swagger, even though we practiced it assiduously. Or if they did, they probably wondered what in the world we were doing.

The trick was to keep the coat on as long as possible after the basketball game started, thus to render the full effect of what we thought of as two men in black. (Even though we were only 17, we considered ourselves to be men.)

The belt came loose first and eventually in the heat and fury of watching the game I think we probably shed the coat, too, thus ruining the effect we had set out to produce. But no matter—we had had our moment of glory.

I kept my black wool overcoat for a long time after I graduated from high school, not so much to wear but as a memento of the time when I had been young and foolish. Eventually, like a lot of other treasured bits of male finery, it disappeared into the Goodwill bag.

I've never really owned a black wool overcoat since. When once I had to spend a year living in New Jersey, where there is snow and cold wind off the Atlantic in the wintertime, I borrowed a coat from a former East Coast resident. But otherwise I've never had cause to want another black wool overcoat since.

Nor, I guess, have I ever wanted to be so conforming. For what happened after the episode with the black coat is that both of us got drafted into the U.S. Army, where conformity, especially in clothing, was a rule. The idea was that we not only should all look alike but that we should all act alike, too.

Two and a half years of doing that convinced me that individuality in thought and dress were as important as conformity was as a teenager.

Teenagers today seem to want to look as much like their peers as I wanted a black wool overcoat a long time ago. Their hair is pretty much all the same length; their clothes are similar, if not the same; and they even use large amounts of the same cosmetics.

But I suppose that's as it ought to be. Being a teenager means finding out who you are. One way to find out who you are is to discover that much of what you are is like everyone else.

That's somehow reassuring—don't ask me why.

But it's also to find out that you're an individual, too, and I think today's teenagers are discovering this just as I did a long time ago.

But don't ask me if it is necessary to have a black wool belted overcoat to do this.

I think it's something else. I think it must have something to do with hormones.