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.)
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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?
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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good heavens. Way too reminiscent of the detergent commercials of my youth; boys got dirty DOING things and girls got dirty dropping food on themselves. Almost makes you respect Maidenform bras, where at least the wearers were doing things, at least in their dreams.
good heavens. Way too reminiscent of the detergent commercials of my youth; boys got dirty DOING things and girls got dirty dropping food on themselves. Almost makes you respect Maidenform bras, where at least the wearers were doing things, at least in their dreams.
You are simply brilliant. I woke up feeling super cranky and then woke up my husband from laughing!!!!