The Nipple Bra is further proof that it wasn’t entirely my parents’ fault.

I once heard a Moth storyteller blame her parents’ failure to meet the minimum requirements of a mother and father on the 1970s. It was a different and inexplicable time in the history of the country, the storyteller explained. A strange and mysterious decade that no one today can quite understand.

A time when the inexplicable became explicable.

I took great comfort in this idea. Having been born in 1971, perhaps this is why my parents failed me in so many ways as well. I quickly latched onto the notion and have been clinging to it ever since.

Since then, I have been watchful for further signs that the 1970s were an anomaly in the history of this country. Anything to bolster the claim that it wasn’t my parents who failed me. It was the decade.

The 1970s were to blame.

The Nipple Bra is one of these signs. An obvious indicator that the people living in the 1970s had completely, albeit temporarily, lost their minds.