My own “wardrobe malfunction.”

Not as spectacular as that of Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl, but antedating hers by about 20 years, I had my own such experience. Around mid-morning one day when I was working in downtown Baltimore, my fly would not zip back up (the little gizmo that goes up and down the zipper track had broken). It so happened that I had a date that day for lunch with a business acquaintance from New York. Normally when visitors arrived to see me, the receptionist would phone me and I would go out to greet them. However, this day when my visitor–a long-time female acquaintance–arrived, I asked my secretary (who was in the know about my predicament) to escort her to my office.

Upon my visitor’s arrival into my office, I didn’t get up to shake hands with her as I normally would have but, rather, remained glued to my chair with my lap out of sight under my desk. Of course, I explained my situation to her; I was not embarrassed, as I would have been with someone I only knew slightly (especially a female), because we had known each other for many years.

Our date was to go for lunch to Tio Pepe, a well-known Spanish restaurant in Baltimore. Luckily, it had been raining that morning when I left home for the office, so I had a lightweight raincoat at the office, which I wore, even though the rain had stopped, to hide my predicament as we left my building and walked up to Tio Pepe. Upon our arrival there, the conversation with the maitre d’ went like this:

Maitre d’: Sir, wouldn’t you like to check your raincoat?

Me: Er, no thanks, I’ll just keep it on.

Maitre d’: But sir, it’s not raining in here.

So, I could sympathize with Ms. Jackson that day in 2004; she didn’t have a raincoat handy to fix her problem.