Scary Girl Stuff   For fifty-one years I’ve been a girl person, during a dizzying period of technological advances that have allowed mankind (oops, I mean human beings without apparent gender) to fly to the moon, dive the Mariana trench, and humiliate me in every conceivable way.   Cathy Rigby, the first US gymnast to win a medal in the Olympics, introduced me, and a whole host of teenage girls to the wonders of modern feminine hygiene products. Kathy made Stayfree Maxi pads cool, and she made you think the you could be upside down on a four inch balance beam and not have a girl care in the world. I must have gotten stuck trying out the maxi-pad prototypes, because I never could do a handstand on a balance beam—ever, but that’s Madison Avenue for you.  You can find out more about Cathy Rigby, the Maxi pad-wearing gymnast, at the Museum of Menstruation.   Later, after my first mammogram, a technological marvel that can look inside your boobs—if your boobs are really, really flat, I was told that I would need a needle nosed biopsy and that the incision would be no larger than a grain of rice.   I should have asked, “Brown or instant?”   With the image of a grain of rice emblazoned on my mind, I walked into the biopsy room, wearing a paper towel, noticed that there was a great big hole in the surgical table, and had a hideous vision of my future.   Horrified, I turned to the strange man about to dig around in my mammary gland and asked, “Is that hole for, what I think it’s for?”   “Yep.”  And it was.   Once I flopped my slightly used, less than perky bosom into the mammary gland hole in the middle of the table the words “Boob Loogie” came to mind.   When the highly touted anesthesia refused to deaden my dangling breast, and I complained loudly, the strange man digging around in my boob with a needle, said, “Well, some breasts are more dense than others.”   “Dude, the end of my boob just hit your shoelace, how dense can it be?”   Don’t even get me started on four C-sections in six years. For my first baby they shaved me “nipples to knees.” No, seriously that was the official medical expression. By the fourth baby, I was watching the entire surgery in a giant mirror, angled for my viewing pleasure.   Recently, my daughters were describing the latest in gynecological advancements in the way of the latest in examination chairs. Apparently, there is a new “exam” chair that mimics the space shuttle in the act of taking off. A girl patient climbs in and with a flick of a switch, stirrups are deployed, the part under your bum disappears, and the chair reclines—until your head is poking down and your girl parts are poking up. When my oldest daughter demonstrated I felt faint and had to put my head between my knees.   “I cannot do it,” I murmured from between my knees, “I simply cannot risk—The Chair. I will be making my next appointment with a certified noble savage of a witch doctor. As Scarlett O’hara is my witness, I swear it.”   I love being a girl.  I love the shoes, the clothes, the makeup, and the mystique of it all, but honestly, is it just me or is the modern world out of its technological mind?   Linda (Girls Just Want to Have Fun) Zern