When I was 13, my breasts popped up overnight, with the surprising jolt of a jack-in-the-box or dual airbags. They were greeted with a heady mixture of fear, pride and confusion. The insane disappointment didn’t come until maybe a year later. For the time being, I didn’t think they needed to be bigger or smaller. But I did think they should have names. You know, like dolls, pets and hurricanes.
It helps to be on a first-name basis in a life where you’ll inevitably be needing to say things like, “I just can’t squeeze Cagney and Lacey into this dress”, “It’s that time of the month, and Tarzan and Jane are sore AF”, “Call me crazy, but I like Romulus better”, or “Hey bud, I’ll show you Abbot and Costello for a fiver.”
For the last 30 years, every New Year I get my boob nomenclature on. I admit, I start thinking about candidates as early as October. Some were rejected right away — “Mork and Mindy? Nah.” Some were deemed too depressing — like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Leopold and Loeb, Sturm und Drang, Abbott and Costello. Some were just a mouthful, e.g., — Stalagmite and Stalactite, Quisp and Quake. In hindsight, some are dumb, but just chalk that up to youth. (Hey, a lot of things in the 70s and 80s seemed like good ideas at the time.)
In no particular order, here are some of my mammaries’ monikers:
Starsky and Hutch
Rocky and Bullwinkle
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Chico and the Man
Jules and Jim
Lady and the Tramp
Watson and Crick
Sperry and McGurk
The Carpenters
Raymour and Flanagan
Crips and Bloods
Currier and Ives
Divide and Conquer
George and Ira Gershwin
The Raw and The Cooked (I’m so nerdy)
Pride and Prejudice (for 6 months, then, Sense and Sensibility)
Rowan and Martin
Strunk and White
Lunt and Fontanne
The Monitor and the Merrimack
Mulder and Scully
Motherhood and Apple Pie
Kaplan and McGuire (for two years running)
War and Peace
Troilus and Cressida
Thelma and Louise
The Owl and the Pussycat
Tristan and Isolde
Burt and Ernie
Flotsam and Jetsam
Hatfield and McCoy
Huntley and Brinkley
Kelley Deal and Kim Deal (The Breeders)
Liz and Dick
Various and Sundry
The King and I
Tower One and Tower Two (9/11 memorial)
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
Woodward and Bernstein
Kurt and Courtney
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
And this year’s breasts’ handle? Drumroll…Cellino and Barnes!
