Jennifer Garner sold scrunchies in college, was raking in the dough

Jennifer Garner was on the Late Show Tuesday night promoting Arthur, which comes out in the US today. It looks like a pale imitation of the original despite the involvement of Dame Helen. (I hope she at least says “May I wash your dick for you?” They need to work that line in there.) The movie is getting trashed on Rotten Tomatoes with a 24% rating, but critic opinions don’t seem to matter when it comes to box office so it could do well. I certainly see enough commercials for it on television.

Garner told a story on Letterman about how she made hair tie scrunchies in college and sold them door to door in the dorms. She said she was so successful and made hundreds that she still runs into people who say “I have your scrunchie.”

Jennifer Garner may be a successful actress, but back in college, she had other ways to pad her wallet. On the Late Show with David Letterman Tuesday, the actress revealed that her college ‘job’ was actually making scrunchies — those infamous ’80s-style hair ties covered in fabric. “My college roommate and I … we were theater geeks and we had a key to the theater department,” she admitted during an appearance to promote her new film, Arthur. “We would go in late at night and we would use their sewing machines and their elastic and we would make scrunchies. We would make boxes full of scrunchies in sorority colors or [ones that were] just cute.” And surprisingly, the gig actually paid the bills. “We went door to door in the dorms and said ‘One for $ 3, two for $ 5,’ and we raked it in! We made so much money!” But as it turns out, unfortunately, Garner wasn’t exactly an expert accessory maker. “We spent so much time on them, [but] we were so bad at them. I was constantly sewing the scrunchie to my clothes — I was a bad scrunchie maker. I’m sure half of them fell apart.”

[From People]

Garner is a year older than I am, I’ll be honest. I graduated high school and started college in 1991. At that point, I wouldn’t have been caught dead with a scrunchie in my hair. My crowd was listening to Nine Inch Nails, Peter Murphy and the Psychedelic Furs. (Some of us got turned on to then-new Nirvana at the time too.) We were wearing combat boots, long shaggy hair and thrift store clothes. Looking back at myself in college, I know I was a stereotype, but that’s what we did back then, we got involved with a group and we identified with them and we dressed like them. The sorority girls were trying to rock the scrunchies, so I guess we can assume Garner was a sorority girl. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it definitely fits with her personality.

Here’s Garner outside the Late Show. Credit: WENN.com