Storm in an AA Cup
I loved the 1939 movie of The Wizard of Oz. I loved it so much I could have pooped rainbows and it would have been no biggie. Dorothy was my girl crush du jour with her cutesy gingham pinafore, her silken pigtails and her feet made of rubies. I knew her songs by heart, even that funny verse about chimneys in Over the Rainbow. Bored in the Christmas holidays, a gang of us decided to put on a pantomime for the street we lived in. We had to make our own amusement somehow. Well, the rest is history, because in my opinion The Wizard of Oz was the best pantomime known to mankind and the Dorothy part was going to be mine, my pretties.
My mates didn’t argue with the plan. Well, who would when faced with someone in a gingham apron and their mother’s red slingbacks? During rehearsals, I spent many an hour wowing them with my impromptu whipping of my hair back and forth, running from side to side, my arms Muppet-flailing, and then falling into the hastily painted cardboard backdrop of Kansas. I was in an imaginary tornado, you see. I WAS living and breathing Dorothy Gale. My friends recognised me for the visionary genius I was.
Oh yes, I took it seriously. Street show or not, you can’t channel Dorothy Gale half-heartedly. That would be criminal. For a start, the red slingbacks needed rhinestones. When I mooted the idea of gluing rubies to her shoes, my mother said no, fearing she’d have to walk the yellow brick road to town every time she wanted a bag of oven chips. Apparently, a modern-day Dorothy wasn’t all about the money. Or the bling. My mother was Miss Gulch in disguise. I thought about offering her the part.
The sad sequin-less ruby slippers without rubies I could just about cope with, but finding out that Judy Garland was actually sixteen and quite curvy when she played Dorothy, not so much. All would have been fine if I wasn’t still under a vest. I wanted everything to be perfect for my Dorothy homage and that meant growing my boobs in time for the performance and allowing them to spring forth like Toto frolicking in a field of poppies, or puppies. Okay, I admit it. It had ten per cent to do with Dorothy and ninety per cent because I JUST WANTED BIG BOOBS!
Give it a few weeks and you’ll be juggling cantaloupes in the Emerald City, I thought. Those flying monkeys won’t be able to carry you because of the weight in your front carriage. Slow to catch on to this idea, my boobs remained tiny. With the performance looming I attempted to show them their true potential by shoving tennis balls down there. A sort of: ‘Hello boobs! Wake up, you lazy lumps of fat, milk glands and tissue!’
They stayed more Munchkin than melon. Never fear, there was one thing I hadn’t tried: the power of mind over matter. I mind and my boobs matter. My boobs were not weak; they would rise to this challenge. Had they not already survived some eejit in the chip shop, battered sausage in one hand, honking them with the other? Had they not survived me falling off a wall and slamming the concrete with my entire body? Yes, I put my teeth through my lip but my chest was made of steel girders. Destroy my mouth but mess with my boobs at your peril, concrete pavement. Ha! And so it began. Day one: I waved my palms over my naked boobs shouting, ‘A-bra-ca-boob-ra!’ After fifty further attempts, I figured I was a candidate for RSI. Day two: I swore there was tingling in my boobs. Proper actual internal prickling, the kind of which only comes from one million Lilliputians wielding needle swords inside your boobs or swelling. I opted for swelling as I thought the Lilliputians were probably elsewhere, chaining Gulliver. Okay, I couldn’t see any movement in my breast department but as my mother said, ‘You don’t need to see God to know he exists.’
Um … yeah.
Day three: I learnt ways to make my mini-mammaries mahoosive. Move forward like a juggernaut of jugs, that’s what I’d do. After much research, I massaged them with butter. Hands up, who’d like to smell of eau de croissant in their quest for big boobs? Me, that’s who. Hands up, who’d like to eat dry toast because there’s no butter left? Excellent! Day four: the tape measure was out. They had grown a millionth of a millimetre. That’s cool, right? One million of anything is awesome. Except germs. Today, a millionth of a millimetre: tomorrow, straight to Dollywood on the fast bus out of Flatsville. Day five: Glinda the Good. I’m not ashamed to admit, I prayed to the good witch. ‘Wave your wand and give me some boobs or else,’ I said. I was good with threats. Unfortunately, no kaleidoscope bubble floated into my bedroom. I swiftly followed this with: ‘I’ll die if you don’t make me a C cup and then you’ll be sorry.’ I pondered that this threat was a touch tricky as it involved actual dying. On day six and seven I drank loads of milk and ate carbs. Before long, I was so full the gingham apron barely stretched across my middle. Time to stop, I thought, before I ended up in the wrong production. Two words: Augustus Gloop.
Three days before the big Dorothy moment, I sprained my ankle on dog poop. All I can say is using a hedge to wipe dog dirt off your rollerskated foot while balancing on the other rollerskated foot is the highway to an elephantine ankle. But the show goes on and my street performance as Dorothy went ahead, despite the agony. There was a standing ovation, no less. Perhaps it was pity applause for my perky little peanuts caught up in a Beaufort number twelve. Or maybe it was because the Munchkins got distracted and sat on their mothers’ laps. Or was it sympathy that I had to hobble down the yellow-bed-sheet-cum-brick-road, leaning on a scarecrow who when he shouted that he needed a brain an audience member (from the house at the end of the street) hollered back, ‘You think you’ve got problems, mate? Dorothy needs a new leg!’ Who knows? Who cares? My ankle was leaden but the feather lightness of my boobs was liberating. I didn’t have to worry about my baps popping out of the apron. Nor did I think for one second that they’d zoom over my shoulder like calamine-lotion-coloured ear muffs. I was small down there and hey, it was okay. No, it was better than okay. I was cool with it.
That night, just like my girl crush Dorothy, I discovered that you can spend your whole life searching for something only to realise that what you desire is right back where you started. That’s the big and small of it. From that point on I decided to embrace my boobs, whatever their size. I treated my puppies like Toto: loved them, kept them safe, stroked them on occasion, and allowed them a special kennel in my heart. And if I was ever in doubt about their brilliance, I clicked my slingbacks three times and repeated: ‘There’s no boobs like mine. There’s no boobs like mine. There’s no boobs like mine.’