A Little Dab'll Do Ya

I wasn’t a big fan of Rachael Ray’s Food Network show. My male friends really dug her, in that Mary Ann vs. Ginger way, and especially found her throaty vocals sexy - an effect I’m able to create every February, recovering from my yearly bout of laryngitis. However, I found that ebullient voice rather grating. I’m happy to say she seems to have kicked that down a notch on her daily talk show, which I happened to catch a couple weeks ago.

I was in my robe, passing some time, thumbing through Oprah magazine while celebrity guest RuPaul, out of drag, was hawking his book “Workin’ It: RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Style.” A few select women in the audience were sharing their beauty woes, like too-short and -thin eyelashes, and I was only half-listening… Until audience member Allison, wearing a wide, plunging neckline, took a seat on stage and admitted to Ru (if I may call him Ru) that she was breast-challenged with not much to show up top. RuPaul knew how to fix that! First, he swirled some glittery powder on a brush, knocked off the excess, then dabbed a vertical “stem” between Allison’s breasts before drawing up the brush to create a martini-glass shape in the same spot as Superman’s “S.” And that’s how, RuPaul said, you can “make a bosom.”

I was riveted. And so was every other woman sitting in a robe, a pink robe, in the waiting room at a local women’s health center on “Diagnostic Day,” which is different from “Screening Day.” We’d all had our screening mammogram sometime during the previous week and had been called back for "additional imaging studies for complete evaluation." I’d already been marked and paddled and scanned —and was waiting to hear if I needed to schedule a biopsy. Might I need an oncologist, surgery? Reconstruction? A update of my will? Though I tend to catastophize (I made up that word), I’m sure most of the women there were at some stage of a similar state during Rachael Ray’s show, only days before the arrival of October, which this year marks 25 years of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. According to one government statistic, 12.7 percent of women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. On this given day, I remain in the 87.3 percent. “See you next year,” my technician said, with a smile, and I reached for the plastic bag containing my above-waist garments. But just before I disappeared behind the curtain to change, I heard her say to the woman who’d been sitting beside me: “The radiologist would like to speak with you.”

Meanwhile Allison was back in her seat, sporting her new sparkling cleavage, marveling at how easy it is to make a bosom.