Joe Gibbs has a night to forget. Which is ironic, since anyone who reads his account will remember it for years...
‘No. Not that one,’ said my wife, as I rifled through her dresses. ‘And not that one either,’ when I held a dark floaty number up against me in the mirror. ‘That’s a Zandra Rhodes I inherited from my aunt and she had a very small waist.’
She handed me a black-and-gold Middle Eastern gown with saucy slits up the sides. I tried it for size. By the time we had rolled it down my torso and over my buns — a procedure that took the full downward force of both of us — it was clear that only nuclear fission would remove it.
Too late, then, to remedy the swooping neckline spread apart by my manly shoulders to reveal my nips. To spare any blushes, I applied crossed Elastoplast pasties over all three of them. Like the Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga, I have a rogue third pap. Q produced a cunning prosthetic version for 007 to impersonate his enemy in The Man with the Golden Gun. Mine would have had me burnt as a witch in 16th-century Scotland. I can claim to be part of a historically persecuted profession to add to the more contemporary victim class of minor gentry in Scotland. The First Minister issued a general apology to us witches in 2022, but the Witchcraft Convictions (Pardons) (Scotland) Bill was withdrawn last year. I have yet to hear a bat squeak from the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, generally desperate to grovel for historic wrongs, or to receive a bawbee in compensation.
But enough of the broomsticks and back to the cross-dressing. The inhabitants of one of our local castellated clan strongholds traditionally celebrate milestone birthdays with transvestite parties. Have done so for generations. Way ahead of the curve.
“Too late, I realised I hadn’t observed the first rule of wearing a tight-fitting dress”
I donned a bejewelled cross — a touch Russell Brand, but hey-ho — and some wildly uncomfortable clip-on earrings. Liberace rocks decked the fingers and we left with that nagging insecurity that we might be the victims of a practical joke and everyone else would be dressed cisgender, the new word for ‘normal’.
Not a bit of it. The terrace resembled the set of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Although the girls made a sporting effort to man up, boys hold the aces when it comes to drag. Belle of the ball went to a local aristo who scrubbed up well enough to be a supermodel. A bearded nun described a contretemps with an amorous Glaswegian when buying cigars in a petrol station. Some of us older chaps put a bit of extra vim into the back slapping, just in case anyone was in doubt as to our orientation.
Sitting down to dinner, I had the sensation of worlds dividing around my nether regions. The sound of ripping cloth confirmed there was a crisis. Too late, I realised I hadn’t observed the first rule of wearing a tight-fitting dress; to wit, hitch it up round the waist when bending in any direction. To make it worse, I had come as no-knickers-Norma. It was going to be a sedentary evening.
Fortunately, I had the conversational gambit of the third nipple to hand to hold my dinner companions rapt beside me for hours. Like the gill slits that develop in human embryos and thankfully disappear, Darwin posited that extra paps might come from our distant kinship with other species, such as dogs. In fact, they are flukes of embryonic development. In 1827, a French lady with a complete third breast on her left thigh produced milk from it and suckled five children. So French. Her hubby must have been thrilled. Next time, I’ll go as her.
