Backwash

Threads
Off the rack and on the town.

Kona Grill, 11 p.m. Thursday

Bud, the Pitch‘s fashion expert, enters the techno-thumping sushi bar looking for just one woman: a 27-year-old late-night diva named Amy. She won’t give her last name, but it doesn’t matter. In this scene, it’s her digits that define her: She’s 5 feet 4, 130 pounds, a 34-D.

He spots her across the long black bar. Tonight, as she does every night, Amy sports her most expensive accessories: a pair of perfectly manufactured fake boobs. She’s even named them. The Girls. The Sisters. The Twins.

In Bud’s continuing effort to understand why people do the things they do, he has recruited Amy to help answer a question that plagues all postpubescent males: How can big fake boobs be bad?

There are two types of boob jobs, Bud says. The cosmetic makes the small-chested woman look regular. The voluptuous makes regular women look like porn stars. For boob jobs, there is just one rule: To keep from becoming a sexual sideshow, a woman’s breasts should remain smaller than her head.

Bud offers Amy a drink. She proceeds to explain that her boobs became large enough to name three years ago, while she was living in Scottsdale, Arizona — a place that rivals Los Angeles for image-consciousness. Everybody there was blond and busty. Amy wouldn’t get a dye job, but she sprang for an impulse buy.

A former Mizzou student, Amy returned to her alma mater for homecoming and paid a doctor $3,500 to inject each breast with 380 cubic centimeters of saline — enough to fill a Coke can — and morphed from a svelte B-cup to a Barbie-proportioned hottie overnight.

Forty-eight hours later, Amy was back at the gym in Arizona’s sun-baked boobtopia, sharing the pain of top-heavy women everywhere. Clothes cling. Strapless bras pinch. Jumping up and down brings aftershocks. You have to check periodically to make sure your orbs are aligned. She found herself wearing more conservative attire to avoid spilling out of tops. Still, she says, “If I think it’s a cool top, I’m going to wear it.”

Her father wasn’t pleased. Raised in the Marilyn Monroe era, he was a boob guy himself, and he didn’t want a generation of similarly indoctrinated men ogling his little girl. But until she moved back to Kansas City to work and attend grad school, Amy never understood the big deal.

Knockers and Midwest conservatives don’t mix. Here, there’s a misconception that booby girls are dumb profligates. Droves of lesser-traveled ex-frat boys cling to their old pickup tactics: Crack enough hooters jokes, and you might have a shot.

Looking around the bar, she can spot no other jug-o-nauts.

“It’s not the norm here,” she says. “Right now, you just get negative attention here. It’s very negative, and it’s offensive. It’s very offensive.”

The Sisters aren’t exactly helping in the dating department, either. Though boobs are a perk in bed, guys don’t like them overall — they’re trouble beacons, drawing out leering idiots who make lustful comments. Amy says she talked to a surgeon about a reduction a week ago.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” she says. “C’s would have been perfect.”

Bud’s not so sure. He thinks they’re marvelous. He asks if he can touch them, and she leans slightly toward him.

“They’re impressive. The best boobs I’ve ever felt,” he proclaims after some exploratory groping.

Net Prophet
Notes from KC’s blogosphere.

A few years back, I was skinning a baboon that had died in a zoo, and been given to the museum. Skinning animals is interesting, but rarely stunning. It involves a little cutting, a lot of gentle tugging, and great care when you finally get to the hands and feet. Mouse feet, cat feet, deer feet, all look pretty normal. But a baboon has fingerprints. They don’t have claws, they have nails. There’s something creepy about skinning a hand with fingerprints. From “Thoughts From Kansas,” the online diary of University of Kansas grad student Joshua Rosenau.

Jimmy the Fetus here, your guide to moral values in the Midwest, helping folks by showing them that the stuff we learned in Sunday school really does matter.

Jimmy The Fetus

Dear Jimmy:

My parents go to church every Sunday and support the troops and everything. But they’ve threatened to disown my brother and me if we say anything about the maid from El Salvador. They don’t pay her, and I overheard Dad telling someone that she’s “working off the cost to get her to Kansas.” I think this is illegal. What should I do?

Lisa

Leawood

Dear Lisa:

Remember what the Bible tells us: “The Egyptian had a spear in his hand; but Benaiah went down to him with a staff, and snatched the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand, and slew him with his own spear.”

In other words, your parents are a couple of shits, girl. You and your brother should organize a little prison break for your indentured housekeeper. Tell your parents a couple of queers are getting married at the courthouse — that oughta get them out of your hair long enough to sneak la chiquita to the West Side.

Some readers may be thinking: “Jimmy, your stem cells are wack. Isn’t there a more appropriate Bible quote?” They’re probably remembering this nugget: “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are round about you.” But El Salvador is way down in Central America, not “round about” the United States. If Lisa’s parents had smuggled the maid from Mexico, then no harm, no foul. But Salvadoran slavery in Kansas just has to stop.

Got a moral quandary? E-mail Jimmy at editorial@pitch.com.