Years ago, back when I still maintained a few foolish illusions, I tried on one of those swimsuits that’s supposed to make you look a size or two smaller. The result, I concluded, was like trying to squeeze 10 pounds of sausage into an eight-pound casing.
A few years before that, I experimented with trying to achieve the opposite effect with a brassiere — the idea being you could maneuver flesh that was never intended to be part of your bosom into simulating that role.
Helping me was a friend and her sister, who was trying to market this particular brassiere. Try as we might, we just could not massage, squeeze and cajole what nature never intended into something that would produce – eureka – actual cleavage.
Not that we didn’t try. In fact, when we finally released the bra from its hooks, it sailed across the room toward a fortuitously closed window, narrowly escaping a perch among the treetops.
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I don’t remember the name of that bra, which probably means it never achieved much in the way of success. Even so, it certainly reaffirmed what Edward Nanas wrote back in February 1964 in “Science and Mechanics,” when he concluded that engineering a bra “involves a design effort comparable to that of building a bridge or a cantilevered skyscraper.”
I, of course, had no such comparisons in mind when at age 13 I managed to convince my mother that, despite evidence to the contrary, I needed a bra.
Remember, this was decades before 6-year-olds would begin demanding “training bras.”
In fact, advice columnist Ann Landers even assisted mothers in delaying this all-important purchase with something she called the “pencil test.” If you could stick a pencil under what you wanted to enclose inside a bra and the pencil stayed in place, then, and only then, were you developed enough to wear a bra. God, how we all hated Ann Landers.
Thankfully, by the time I got my first bra, the rather scary-looking “bullet” bras worn by movie stars like Jane Russell were no longer in vogue. In fact, our bras at that time seemed to be pretty natural, notwithstanding a little well-placed Kleenex here and there.
As I grew older, I settled into one style of bra that I faithfully bought at Penney’s. In fact, I knew the size and style so well I could buy them without having to first try them on — an onerous chore if there ever was one.
And then a few years ago, Penney’s changed its entire merchandizing and marketing philosophy, alienating its longtime customers, myself included.
Naturally, I vented in print about all this and just months later was thoroughly vindicated when Penney’s turned away from this disastrous route and went back to the good-old Penney’s many of us had known.
Alas, my old bras did not make their way back to the shelves. Which means I am once more at the mercy of the fitting room. That’s not all. Bras have also undergone a marked transformation. For some reason, many of them now seem to be made of foam, often in colors of bright orange, yellow and lime.
I fear wearing one would somehow make me look like I was sporting two halves of a Nerf ball.
And so I soldier on in what seems like a fruitless quest for the perfect bra. I tell ya, it’s enough to make me wish I could still fail that pencil test.