Michaele Salahi's Precious Yearbook Photos

Before Michaele Salahi was a party-crashing Real Housewife, she was “Missy,” a brunette with dreams of modeling. Let’s take a look back at who Missy-Michaele was 26 years ago.

1984: Reagan was re-elected, Band-Aid was singing, and Michaele “Missy” Salahi was graduating from Oakton High School. She was president of DECA and a member of the Future Business Leaders of America — a young girl who was going places, whether she had an invite to those places or not.

But long before she realized her dream of posing in a sari for D.C.’s elite, Missy-Michaele dreamed of posing for pictures for a living. From a list of individual students’ goals:

The modeling career may not have panned out (perhaps because she was aiming for the wrong coast), but even 25 years ago there were hints of what was to come:

To reiterate:

Prescient! Meanwhile, Missy-Michaele was, like many a young lady, smitten by a boy.

[Click to enlarge.]

(Michaele’s name, in the kind of typo nostalgic of old-school printing, seems to have been left out — and error which, given her what we now know about her personality, probably upset her to no end. But if you look at an alphabetical listing of her class, this is obviously her entry…appropriately wedged between a Big D and the kind of kid destined to make money.)

So who’s DMc, the heartthrob with whom she shared that magical night? (By the dashboard light? Unconfirmed.) If DMc was in her class, there’s only one stud with a name that might be abbreviated to DMc: Darren McCarey.

Well, hello there.

I called McCarey — who’s now living near Richmond with a wife and kids — to see if he was, in fact, the young man whose bow tie was once knotted around young Missy-Michaele’s heart. McCarey could only vaguely recall Missy, and he had absolutely no idea that she had grown up to be the White House party-crashing reality star who she is today. He also couldn’t recall whether or not he’d been romantically involved with her and asked me to email him these pictures, hoping to jog his memory — and he never wrote back. Silence is an admission of guilt! Or embarrassment! Or just middle-aged forgetfulness. If in her youth Missy-Michaele was already at that point of what the Washington Post described as “brimming with a phoniness that supersedes merely phony. She’s so phony she’s authentic,” then perhaps she was someone McCarey wanted to forget, and he was able to do just that.