I am Woman - Boas and Tatas

 

Last week some friends and I walked to raise money for women's cancers.  The focus was breast cancer, which my mother battled for 7 years before succumbing.  

I named our team after my mother and we joyously entered the decorated bra contest.  Basically you wear your bra outside your T-shirt and spruce it up.  We went with feather boas.  

We met at the start of the walk, milling around with thousands of other people, checking out the promotional stands.  There was a stage where they were giving out prizes and acknowledgements.  Survivors were asked to go up on stage and state their name and how many years they had triumphed over their disease.  It was very poignant.

Then we heard the announcement that decorated bras should come up on stage.  So up we went.  There were already a bunch of people on the platform and they had music blaring, so we danced across the whole stage to the other end, where there was room to stand.  

A guest announcer from a local TV station took the microphone, and I began to realize that there weren't many women on stage... a bunch of people with decorated bras in the audience hadn't come up.  "Well," I thought to myself, "maybe they're shy."

The announcer then proceeded to detail winners of various decorated bra categories - individual, group and child.  

And that's when it hit me.

These people had all decorated their bras before the walk and sent in photos.  They were the winners of the categories. 

So everyone on stage got a prize and applause and we stood there, smiling and clapping.  I whispered to my friends what was going on and we all saw the funny side... we were fierce feather-boaed femmes fatales and we had totally just got up on stage and gatecrashed a prize-giving ceremony!

It gets better.

That night, on the local news, footage of us can-can dancing, boas aloft, featured on the local news when they reported on the event.

YEAH BABY!  I'm forty, fabulous and famous!  And all for a good cause!

To read more in the I am Woman series, click here.