I am sitting on this stage at a fan convention in New Jersey, and the room is packed to the rafters.

There is a young man in the front row, couldn’t be more than twenty, wearing an 8063rd MASH shirt, and he asks me the question I have heard a thousand times but never get tired of answering.

He wants to know about the dresses.

Specifically, he wants to know if there was ever a time when the wardrobe actually fought back against me.

I have to laugh because my mind goes straight back to a Tuesday in 1976, right in the middle of a brutal summer in the Santa Monica mountains.

Most people don’t realize that while Alan and Mike and the rest of the guys were lounging in their comfortable, loose-fitting cotton fatigues, I was usually strapped into a corset or squeezed into a dress designed for someone about four sizes smaller than me.

We were filming an episode where Klinger was trying a particularly elegant approach to getting his Section 8 papers.

I was wearing this incredible, shimmering, floor-length evening gown from the 1930s.

It was a beautiful piece of vintage fashion, but it was made of a material that had absolutely zero give.

It was the kind of dress where you don’t really breathe; you just hold your breath for the duration of the take and hope for the best.

Because it was so fragile and so incredibly tight, the wardrobe department wouldn’t let me sit down between shots.

If I sat, I would wrinkle the silk or, even worse, I would pop a seam that we didn’t have time to fix.

So, between takes, they had this thing called a leaning board.

It is basically a piece of plywood with armrests, tilted at a slight angle, so I could lean back without putting any pressure on the fabric.

I looked like a sequined mummy waiting to be transported to a museum.

The scene we were doing involved me having to march up to Harry Morgan, who played Colonel Potter, and deliver a very serious report while looking like a debutante at a high-society ball.

The sun was beating down at a hundred degrees, the dirt was flying, and I could feel the tension in the fabric every time I took a single step.

I remember looking at Harry’s face, and he had that classic Potter “I am not amused” look, which always made me want to giggle.

I took a deep breath to start my line, feeling the stays of the dress digging into my ribs.

And that’s when it happened.

The sound was like a small gunshot echoing off the canvas of the mess tent.

It wasn’t just a little rip or a tiny tear in the fabric.

It was a catastrophic, total structural failure of the entire back of the garment.

One second I was a polished, albeit slightly hairy, vision of 1940s glamour, and the next, I felt the sudden, cool rush of the Malibu breeze hitting my back in places that a breeze should never hit during a filming session.

The zipper hadn’t just slid down; it had completely disintegrated under the pressure of my lungs expanding.

Now, usually, when something goes wrong on set, you try to play through it to save the take, but there was no playing through this.

I could feel the entire dress starting to slide forward because there was nothing left to hold it up.

I instinctively grabbed the front of the bodice to keep from giving the crew a show they definitely didn’t sign up for.

The first person to react was Harry Morgan.

Harry was the consummate professional, a man who had worked with everyone from Jack Webb to John Wayne, and he prided himself on never breaking character.

He saw the look of pure terror on my face, and then he looked down and saw the sequins literally raining onto the dry California dirt like blue hailstones.

He tried. God, he tried to stay in character.

His lip started to quiver, and he did that thing where he cleared his throat and adjusted his cap, trying to find his stern Colonel Potter voice.

But then he looked at me again, clutching this shimmering pile of fabric to my chest like a Victorian maiden in distress, and he just lost it.

Harry’s laugh wasn’t a normal laugh; it was a high-pitched cackle that signaled the end of any productive work for at least the next thirty minutes.

Once Harry went, the floodgates opened.

Alan Alda was standing just off-camera waiting for his cue, and he just doubled over, pointing at the trail of sequins I had left behind me like a very confused version of Hansel and Gretel.

Mike Farrell was leaning against a jeep nearby, laughing so hard he had to take his glasses off just to wipe the tears from his eyes.

But the real kicker was our director, Burt Metcalfe.

Burt was usually the guy trying to keep us on schedule because we were always running behind and the sun was always moving across the mountains.

I looked over at him, fully expecting a lecture about the budget or the cost of wardrobe repairs.

Instead, I saw Burt slumped over his director’s chair, his shoulders shaking violently.

He couldn’t even speak to call a cut.

He just waved a hand in the air as if to say, “Give up, everyone, we are done for the day.”

The camera crew was no better off.

The lead cameraman actually had to step away from the eyepiece because his own laughter was shaking the entire rig, which would have made the footage look like we were filming during a major earthquake.

I’m standing there, half-naked in the middle of the 4077th compound, with Rita, our wonderful wardrobe lady, running toward me with a sewing kit and a look of absolute despair.

She was shouting, “I told you not to breathe in that dress! Jamie, I told you!”

The funniest part was that even while I was being pinned and tucked back together right there in the dirt, the cast wouldn’t stop the teasing.

Every time I tried to apologize to the crew, Larry Linville would chime in with a joke about Klinger’s “explosive” personality or how I was literally busting out of the United States Army.

We must have spent forty-five minutes just trying to pick the sequins out of the dust so they wouldn’t ruin the continuity of the next shot.

It became a legendary story on the set because it perfectly summed up the absurdity of what we were doing every day.

Here we were, making a show about a tragic war, trying to find the humanity in these terrible situations, and the highlight of our afternoon was a middle-aged man’s evening gown giving up the ghost.

It reminded us that no matter how serious the script was, we were still just a bunch of people in the woods wearing ridiculous costumes.

That dress was eventually retired, or “dishonorably discharged,” as Larry put it later that day.

I think they had to rebuild the entire back panel with industrial-strength elastic just in case I decided to take another deep breath in the future.

Looking back, those moments were the glue that held us together through eleven long seasons.

If we couldn’t laugh at a gown exploding in the dirt, we never would have made it through the long nights and the freezing cold winters.

It was a lesson in humility, mostly because it’s hard to feel like a big-shot actor when you’re standing in your underwear in front of sixty crew members while a lady named Rita scolds you for having ribs.

Every time I see a sequined dress now, I still get a little bit of phantom anxiety in my lower back.

It’s amazing the things you remember when you’re just trying to get a laugh and stay in the moment.

I wouldn’t trade those days for anything, though, not even for a dress that actually fit me.

We were a family, and families are usually at their best when someone’s clothes are falling apart.

It’s the unplanned disasters that make the best memories, don’t you think?

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever had to wear for a job?