The Giddy Hilarity of Bras

How an Underwear Catalog changed my view of EVERYTHING.

Now that we have moved past the Fourth of July, we find ourselves adrift in a holiday no-man’s-land. Here we are, stuck until Labor Day (September 4) without any government sanctioned opportunities to decorate or buy mattresses and large appliances at disappointing discounts. Unsurprisingly, we find this disconcerting because we humans love our holidays. In ancient Rome they had 159 publicly funded holidays a year. That comes out to three a week!  The ancient Romans were so busy packing and unpacking decorations and lights and preparing special meals for extended family members they’d been avoiding that they forgot to notice their empire was crumbling.

So now, as we crawl slowly through this annual holiday desert, what do we have to distract us and keep our spirits up? Sure, we can go to Costco any day in July or August and spend as much time as we like looking at the Christmas displays. But at some point we are going to have to face the dire lack of anxiety that an upcoming holiday would offer. How much can we take? After all, are we not already surrounded by alarming climate change catastrophes while being hammered by a daily onslaught of heart-stoppingly stupid policy ideas from short-sighted cretins in various branches of our government who have been somehow permitted to create new laws that will definitely make life worse? Some of us (me) are in three unions that are simultaneously on strike because streaming network CEO’s who make a hundred million a year (David Zaslav of Discovery) are pleading poverty.(Bob Iger of Disney.)

Where oh where do we go for the relief from a hit of joy?

This was certainly how I saw things until the day I finally got around to cleaning off the table in my entry hall where I let stuff pile up until it looks like I am building a replica of The Great Pyramid of Giza. So there I was, half-heartedly leafing through a catalog I had never opened, mere seconds before I intended to pitch it into the trash, when my jaw dropped and my eyes widened. I realized I was being offered wisdom and insight in a place where I least expected to find either. It was, after all, an 8x10 inch mail order catalog about bras.

A woman grows up being advised that she must wear a bra every day from about age 11 on. Immediately she notices that they aren’t comfortable. They definitely take getting used to. The straps fall down. The binding from the tight elastic across the back creates unflattering pockets of flab in places you thought looked just fine. Many are the times that a woman who has been wearing a bra all day waits patiently for a private moment where she can sneak away unobserved and perform that slight-of-hand-magic-trick that every bra wearing woman learns by middle school: how to deftly remove a bra and pull it out of your sleeve without taking off any outer clothes.

Yes, the petty irritations created by a bra are many. But have they been blinding us to the ways a bra can be relied upon for gaiety and merriment?

Look at the smile on the face of this ebullient woman. So beside herself with joy is she about her new bra that she has decided to juggle what appears to be a potato. Talk about an unexpected thing to do with a potato! Why, I find myself wondering, has it never once occurred to me to do that? But potato juggling is the kind of OUTSIDE-THE-BOX thinking that is automatic when you put on a new bra.

Here is a woman still wearing her big scholarly glasses, even though she is partially undressed. Perhaps she has just come from class and was so engrossed in her studies that she was unaware that she’d removed her shirt. But when she looked down and saw she was still wearing her thrilling new bra, she said to herself “Good Lord. Why am I sitting here trying to read so many difficult books when all around me there is so much life to be lived! “ And with that, she begins to try to just insert the contents of her required class reading directly into her brain through the top of her skull. LOL. We all sort of suspect that she’s only kidding! Because we know we are witnessing the kind of buoyant good nature that this brand new bra has brought to her tedious academic schedule. She is finding out that there is nothing in this world worth learning that a brand new bra can’t immediately teach you.

How easy is it to totally relate to this one? Because who among us does not occasionally purchase more fruit than they are going to be able to consume? So before it rots, of course you go scrolling through a recipe site, looking for ways to preserve it. And when you do, if you are smart enough to have first removed your shirt and lucky enough to be wearing your new black bra, then the world just seems to open up to you in magical ways. Under what other circumstances would it occur to you to make double skewers of unpeeled oranges! Are they for grilling a brand new cooked-in-the-peel orange kebab? Or are they a theatrical prop for a vividly imagined interpretive jazz dance that you will use at a hoped for audition with Alvin Ailey? Or if that fails, at least a viral video for TikTok? Maybe you have invented the idea of a fruit ninja? The choice is yours!

Suddenly you are seeing all of the fruit in your refrigerator in a radically different light. When you decided to take that kitchen knife and stab that apple, was it because you were you having a micro-dosing flashback? Or were you preparing for a starring role in a modern day production of Hamlet? Or did you simply discover a way to eat an apple as though you’d been teleported to the middle ages and were attending a banquet thrown by King Edward IV? The mind reels at all of the new ways of looking at the mundane that have suddenly opened up to you. Maybe you will never put a shirt on again.

Even though you are usually someone who would wear some outer clothes when she heads to KFC to buy herself some dinner, thanks to the influence of your capricious new bra, you decide instead to go out dressed only in your underwear . So freeing do you find the experience, that you decide to treat yourself to a bucket of chicken big enough to feed a family of 12. No, you don’t have a family of 12. In fact, you live by yourself. But now you have the courage to carry that enormous bucket of cholesterol laden dead animal limbs right over to your favorite chair, settle in and eat all 16 pieces alone. Will eating all these deep fried legs and breasts be bad for your heart and cause you to gain so much weight that your perfect midriff will begin to form bulges? Do you care? Go over to the mirror right now, lady, and have a look at that perfect midriff of yours. No denying that you look unbelievably great RIGHT NOW. And all we have is the present. So LIVE IN THE NOW. LIVE IN THE PRESENT. Chow down on chicken for twelve!

Yes, thanks to this simple bra catalog, I found myself re-united with a childlike appreciation for the creative possibilities in everything! In this photo, we see a woman who was in the midst of pouring herself the most enormous bowl of cereal that any woman her size could possibly eat, when it occurred to her “Why am I even bothering with a bowl? Just because its customary and society expects it of me? Am I a woman or an I a pre-programmed AI robot?” And in that moment she upends the trajectory of her tired old breakfast expectations, electing to instead pour it on her head and let it rain down around her like hail. “Be original. Live in the moment” she can hear her bra telling her. Thank you, wise bra, for this new persepective. Thank you .

Outside the box is simply where we bra-owners live now. It’s our new neighborhood. Why eat one popsicle at a time when the good lord gave us TWO hands. It’s TWO POPSICLES at a time for you and your brand new bra.

It’s obviously no accident that we were created with two hands and two breasts. And two eyes and two ears and two nostrils. So doesn’t it make sense that symmetry demands that now, since we are doing all our eating in our new bras, when it comes time for cannolis, TWO is definitely the right amount! Two cannolis headed straight for your one and only mouth. Hey, shouldn’t we also have two mouths? Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.

In the mood for a pancake? The old you would have had two. But now you are thinking “How about seventeen?” Plus a great big additional fork full of more pancake that you apparently stole from someone else’s plate since it looks like you haven’t even started to eat your own pancakes yet. But when you are so full of a bubbling buoyant spirit of fun that it fills the room, who would ever dream of telling you no. They just stare in awe at the way you manage to revel in every ordinary moment. When you set such a good example, no one really cares if you steal their food. And there’s no one to thank for this extraordinary change of heart about EVERYTHING except your delightful new bra.

So...let us all take a moment to say thank you to all the bras for the years of wacky hilarity and pure exuberant creativity that they have provided for us, unacknowledged.

Oh bras, of all the underwear, I crown you the second funniest. Though I suspect you still have a way to go to beat underpants

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