Orrin and Stephen and the Tittie Box

Dear Andrew:

Thank you for the NASA patches and the totally awesome replica of the Apollo 11 rocket.

I am, of course, reminded of a story.

We'll call it Orrin and Stephen and the Tittie Box.
 

At some point in the late 60's/early 70's Stephen and I were obsessively collecting aluminum and newspapers, because at that point you could still recycle them for cash.

Fortuitously, our Grandfather owned his Apartment building in Brooklyn, so my grandmother brought us a huge pile of papers that the tenants had thrown out (she also literally fought bums for soda cans to bring to us).  We prepared the newspapers for delivery to the recycling center &, to our adolescent wonder and joy, found that we had hit the motherlode--some tenant had tossed in his Playboy magazines along with his New York Posts.  God Bless Hugh Hefner!

Now it being the sixties, and our mod parents being "progressive", we were, if not encouraged, at least not discouraged from having a boyish curiosity about female anatomy--we were allowed to keep our treasure trove.  And, as you may have noticed, we Judds are nothing if not literal-minded, so we quickly cut to the chase.  We didn't just tear out the pictures, we actually cut out the women's breasts & only their breasts (in this gentler time you were not submitted to full genitalia shots and the like, the women of Playboy, like Barbie dolls, were devoid of such things).

Now what can a pair of boys do with such a valuable collection of breasts?  How pay them the honor they are due?

Well, it just so happened that we had a model replica of the Apollo 11 capsule that came in a special slipcase, so that if you disassembled it you could keep the pieces in the box.  Of course, we loved the space program, but the feats of Man can not compare to the wonders of God.  So we made this slipcase the repository of our collection--it became The Tittie Box.

So far so good, right?  A couple of All-American boys having good pre-pubescent fun (or well on their way to becoming serial killers, one or the other).  Until a day came that lives on in the lore of the Judd clan.

Our grandparents had come to visit.  You may remember how straightlaced a man was The Honorable Orrin G. Judd.  This is a man who was called by the police at 3:00 am because they'd found his car in the street (an unsuccessful burglary attempt apparently) & they wanted him to move it, so he got dressed--no, I mean got dressed in his three piece suit, tie, garters, wingtips, the whole nine yards to go three blocks & repark his car at three in the morning.  He wore two piece bathing suits for cripes sake.  At Mets games, the man kept score with a fountain pen.

Well, you probably see it coming, my Mother looks up and what does she see in the hands of this saintly (never had a drink in his life, never swore, wouldn't work on Sundays) old-fashioned man--of course, he's holding The Tittie Box.  Now legend has it that there was a tiny sonic boom as Mother actually achieved Mach 1 in her race across the room to grab the box before he could open it.  We'll never know if that's true or not, but we do know that she earned beaucoup bonus points in Heaven for saving our Grandfather from a shock that surely would have killed him.

Thanks again for the Apollo 11.