What I Wore to the Academy Awards

The first time I went to the Academy Awards, my evening bag was crammed with  a spare set of nursing pads. I wore a turquoise silk tunic and skirt, and would have been mortified to cast my eyes towards my chest and see two widening circles of wet radiating out from my nipples. Oscar, with his lack of genitalia, probably would not have understood the biological necessities that come with fully involved motherhood. And I, perhaps, didn't quite understand how to balance the disparate elements of my life. Motherhood, wife-dom, the big fat L.A. life that was already encroaching on what I thought would be my one and only true love.
The moon, not the sun, was the center of my universe before my daughters were born. I rotated around the night life, albeit a low-budget one, until I was thirty-four years old. When I gave up doing theatre, parties, and going out with friends, I never looked back. A few years later, perched in my theatre seat at the Oscars, I lapsed into a fit of embarrassed giggling when the wife of the client we were with opened her bejeweled bag to reveal her own set of nursing pads. I wonder if she struggled with balance the same way I did, if she's still married, if her children have brought as much happiness and worry to her as my own have brought me.
And I wonder if the people whom I am legally restrained against writing about were at Hollywood's biggest love fest last night. I wonder too, if a certain heavy bearded man in a tux should get some kind of statuette for attending the Academy Awards the most times with a woman who has nursing pads in her purse. Then again, Warren Beatty probably took home the statuette for that.