Eight-Year-Old Who Dresses Up As a Different Historical Figure Each Day Is Our New Hero

Eight-year-old Stella Ehrhart decides what to wear each day by looking through her book, 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century, and picking a different notable female historical figure.

Recent selections include Billie Holiday (black dress, red tissue-paper flower), Grace Kelly (pink satin lace), and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. (Girl knows how to mix it up!)

Stella has dressed as a different awesome famous woman every single day for over a year — EVERY SINGLE DAY, which makes me slightly depressed because I can’t even get it together most mornings to decide which pair of black tights is clean enough to wear again — and her outfits often serve as “teachable moments” for the rest of the third-grade class, according to the Omaha World-Herald:

“We’d have to get on the computer and figure out who she was,” said her second-grade teacher, Shannon Roeder, who keeps a picture of an overtly costumed Stella (it was Halloween) hanging in her classroom. In the picture, Stella poses in front of Roeder’s bumper-sticker-plastered Prius, its license plate reading “ENDWAR,” wearing a cardboard car cutout also plastered in bumper stickers, with the same vanity plate.

Stella’s costumes prompt classroom discussion, some copycatting and further creativity. When she dressed as Rosa Parks, she and her classmates devised a play and designated different people as the bus driver and other bus passengers.

Her teachers don’t mind — “There are times I even forget,” one said. “It’s not an attention-getter ‘Look at me.'” — and Stella’s classmates don’t think she’s a freak. “Ummm, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” one girl said of her favorite Stella costume. “She wore, like, these shoes that were black and white. She wore, like, this dress with leggings. It’s kind of cool. I might do it next year.”

(BRB, OVERCOME BY EARNEST JOY.)

After the holidays, Stella’s going to mix it up and start wearing a school uniform every day. Can you blame her? Her costume days might be coming to an end, but someone needs to write a children’s book/movie/ goal-oriented life action plan based on this girl ASAP. Stella, will you humor us and start a blog? We can hook you up with Tavi…

Omaha schoolgirl dresses as a different historical figure each day [Omaha World-Herald]