a musical expression
By rbeerhorst on December 4th, 2008
This in a new drawing in a series I am currently working on of ukulele girls. I really like those bathing suites from the 40s and early 50s and I don’t know why. When a musician is performing a place in the heavenlies opens up. People hearing can be nourished into their souls.
I am talking about soul music. I am talking about mystical breast feeding.
This is graphite on heavy printmaking paper. I am using a 1949 Sears catologue for reference material. Women in girdles to follow.
December 9th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
This drawing reminds me of a story I wrote called “Vonderbra”.
In the seventh grade my friend, Janet Thompkins, told me that the German name for bra was bosomhalter. She learned that from her frauish mother, a loud-voiced woman with gigantic canon-like bosoms that seemed to be an arsenal ready to explode under her already angry face. I didn’t like being in that house and I didn’t like the idea of wearing a bra, either. Bras in the early 60’s were still very restrained–cotton contraptions, always in white, with a definite cone shape forcing soft supple breasts into a warrior pose.
My mother took me to Jacobson’s lingerie department to get fitted up once she decided I qualified as an A or B. She was reluctant to discuss personal things of any nature, much less budding breasts, so I only knew about beginner bras from furtive locker room glances. No preadolescent training wheels for me–straight on to a full size two-wheeler.
The matron of Jacobson’s lingerie department might have been Mrs. Thompkins’ old maiden aunt. She used the direct, hands on approach to fitting bras. “Lift up your blouse, dearie. Turn around. Let me see.” Off she went to the smooth gliding, maple veneer drawers full of the mysteries of womanhood. “Here, try this one.” That meant, put it on and let her strap you in. When I looked down at my chest all I saw was wads of stitched, starched material folded in on my thin-skinned frame. “Bend over!” came the order from tiny Frau Brameister. She grabbed the back of the bra where the rank and file of hooks and eyes stood at attention and she shook me. She shook me and all my newly grown flesh until skin and fat and tiny nipples realigned themselves into the acceptable post-World War II breast shape.
Is that me? Is that the form I want to take? At age thirteen in 1962, one had no choice. My mother bought three or four and took me home. Soft friendly undershirts were replaced with pinching foreign equipment. I curled my shoulders forward and my back down into a camouflaging stoop. Please God, do I have to grow up into one of those pointy breasted, pointy nailed and pointy-toed females with their well-packaged anger not yet released upon the world?