By Gazonga Gal

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Of course, William Butler Yeats was not referring to wardrobe malfunctions when he wrote that, but he might as well have been. When Janet Jackson unintentionally flashed boob during the 2004 Super Bowl, the FCC fined CBS Television $550,000 in punishment for forever emotionally scarring the tender sensitivities of beer swilling, chili gorging, face-painted, belching football fans nationwide with the terrible beauty of the nipple.
But flimsy bra straps and ill-stitched halter-tops have oft wreaked havoc with the well-endowed female. Case in point: A cousin of mine, also amply blessed with a superfluity of boobage, accidentally exposed her chesticles to the entire audience during a high school production of the musical Gypsy. The rented chorus girl costumes were simply not up to the task of supporting her hefty hooters and exploded at a critical crescendo, which led to the Great Chorus Girl strike of ’75, of which I must say, I was the ringleader.
After that memorable “outing,” I, with a cadre of other busty chorines in tow, marched up to the director, costumes in hand, and decreed that they must be altered.
“But they’re rented!” he protested.
“Do you really want a repeat performance of tonight’s little showstopper?” I asked point blank. He did not. Luckily, along with large breasts, I was gifted with sewing skills that had earned me an A+ in Home Ec. By the next day’s matinee, the precarious costumes were secured and our titterettes were safe from further untoward display.
Many years later, while attending a formal company function at a swank nightclub in New York City, I was beset by my own décolletage debacle. It was the firm’s annual Christmas party—back in the days when companies actually had the budgets for such frivolities—and for the occasion, I had donned a floor-length, bottle green stretch velvet sleeveless gown that hugged my curves like the proverbial scenic railway. (Let’s just get it out of the way: 39” x 24” x 36”.) To slip into this slinky number required certain feats of engineering, namely a well-constructed bustier that cinched me in and hefted my girls to the heavens. Breathing? Who needs breathing when you look like Jessica Rabbit?
However, as I made my rounds, glad-handing and how-do-you-doing (we didn’t call it networking back then), I felt an odd sensation on the left side of my cleavage. Something niggling. Something nagging. Something not right. I had just greeted my immediate boss, and was standing in a small circle of upper-echelon employees, when, as if mesmerized by a snake charmer’s Pungi, an errant underwire reared its cobra-like head and inched its way up and out of my cleavage—at the exact moment our ultra conservative über boss came to shake my hand.
“Toothpick?” I asked, offering it to him without missing a beat.
“No thanks,” he replied smiling. “Perhaps later, after the hors d’oeuvres.”
“Great party,” I said. “Thanks so much.”
“Indeed,” he replied, his eyes twinkling. “Great party indeed.”
Crisis averted. And thankfully, in this case, a mountain was not made out of my molehills. Good thing the FCC wasn’t invited to that little shindig, though. By the by, does anyone know what the fine is when corsets attack?