Blubber and "We must develop our bust"

[Carol]

danielle dassero wrote:
>
> I don't think I've read blubber, I read are there god in 7th grade
as part of english and the guys i walked home with  used to the i must
i must i must increase my bust exercise and just cracked me up.

Carol responds:
My apologies for the belated response, but I haven't had time to post
lately.

At any rate, I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Is that
exercise depicted in "Are You there, God? It's Me, Margaret"? If so, I
must read that book because one of the more humiliating experiences of
my adolescence was Girls" PE. We wore horrible white uniforms (a
blouse and shorts) that had to be *ironed.* (Surely, the manufacturers
could have made them permanent press? It *had* been invented, even in
those days.

So imagine a tall, skinny blonde girl with glasses who's just learning
to shave her legs and sometimes has razor burn because she hasn't
quite got the hang of it yet having to hold out her arms, bent at the
elbow like chicken wings at shoulder height, and bring them to gether
and apart, all the time chanting along with twenty-four other
embarrassed girls, "We must! We must! We must develop our bust!" Not
only did we know there were boys watching us out the window of some
classroom, distracted from Algebra or Biology or whatever they were
supposed to be studying and whispering about us to each other, but I
hated the bad grammar. If we *must* recite ths stupid rhyme (and what
was the teacher *thinking* to make us do it?), at least "busts" should
be plural (and the heck with the rhyme) since we didn't share a
collective bust!

Carol, who had to recite that wretched rhyme in eighth, ninth, and
tenth grades and is now wondering why she can't remember doing it in
eleventh or twelfth (no PE in those years?)