Underwear In Space Poem by gershon hepner

You should not think it a disgrace
when girls don’t wear, while they’re in space
the underwear that they’re expected
to wear on earth. I’ve not inspected
in outer space the girls for who
a brassiere is quite taboo
according to George Lucas and
the princess, Leia, who was banned
from wearing bras where any weight,
including her mammalian freight,
would be far less than here where gravity
prevents deplorable depravity
associated with the sag
of breasts not packed into a bag,
and to the chest wall tightly bound
to make sure they won’t flop around.
Of course, if girls are really spacey,
they may wear bras if they are lacy
to turn on astronauts who yearn
for underwear while rockets burn
as vigorously as the vibrator
received by Carrie from her mater
when only fifteen—sort of gift
that makes more than the nipples lift.
If pleaded to with urgency,
girls may, in an emergency,
put on a lacey bra George Lucas
considers wrong as roofs on succahs,
but since he’s never been to space
except in movies, let’s not base
our attitude re lingerie
to what breasts may or may not weigh.
In heaven this should, just as on earth,
be based not upon weight, but girth.

Charles McGrath writes about Carrie Fisher’s new book “Wishful Drinking” (“Princess Leia’s Wit Tames the Dark Side, ” NYT, January 2,2008) :
The title of Carrie Fisher’s funny, sardonic little memoir is a bit misleading. Drinking seems to have been the least of her problems. Pills were more her thing, and for a while hallucinogens. As a teenager, she dropped so much acid that her parents called in the greatest LSD expert they knew: Cary Grant. Her parents were Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and that was part of the problem. They were the Jennifer and Brad of their day, the tabloids’ favorite couple, with Elizabeth Taylor, for whom Mr. Fisher left his wife and family, eventually taking on the role of Angelina, plusher and without the tattoos. “You might say I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding, ” Ms. Fisher writes. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.” Though Ms. Fisher now lives next door to her mother, and is on good terms with her father, neither was much of a parent. He was too busy dating, getting married and having face-lifts. She meant well enough, but was first and last a performer. The great event of Ms. Fisher’s childhood was watching Mom enter one end of a room-size closet — the Church of Latter Day Debbie, her daughter called it — and come out the other powdered, sprayed and gowned, with better posture and a different accent. As a consequence of her upbringing, Ms. Fisher says, “I find that I don’t have what could be considered a conventional sense of reality.” When the author was 15, Ms. Reynolds gave her a vibrator for Christmas, and also gave one to her own mother, who declined to use it for fear it would short out her pacemaker. Some years later, perhaps taking the inbreeding principle to extreme, Ms. Reynolds suggested that her daughter ought to have children with Richard Hamlett, Ms. Reynold’s last husband.
And of course there was George Lucas, who cast her as Princess Leia in “Star Wars” and made her a pinup girl for generations of geeky adolescents who gazed up in longing at their bedroom poster of Ms. Fisher in a metallic bikini, chained to giant slug. “George Lucas ruined my life, ” Ms. Fisher says, which doesn’t seem entirely fair. On the other hand, in a book full of weirdos, he emerges as possibly the strangest of all. He wouldn’t let Ms. Fisher wear a bra under her Princess Leia shift because, as he patiently explained to her, there is no underwear in space: according to Lucas-physics, if you were to wear a bra in a weightless environment, your bra would strangle you.


1/2/09