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

Raymour and Flanagan

Kaplan and McGuire 

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

War and Peace

Troilus and Cressida

Thelma and Louise

The Owl and the Pussycat

Tristan and Isolde

Bert 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

Last year’s boob handle?  Cellino and Barnes.

And 2019’s breasts’ soubriquet is…drumroll…Thoughts and Prayers!

1/8/2020 UPDATE: I was gonna go with Quid and Quo (topical!), but I’m going with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.