How’s that for a dramatic title? Okay, that is definitely over speak. But WOW, it’s been an interesting couple of months. And, yes, by interesting I mean sucky. I think it started around my birthday in June. Sure the age thing is always a kick in the ass. “How am I this old?!” The television season ended without me booking anything. Summer was on us and I had no firm plans to produce my one-woman show. And, I was still unemployed. So, what did I do? Well, like all smart people I slowly stopped exercising. I had been very regimented about walking miles daily. But with the despair came the “fuck its.” So, why would I continue to do the one thing that was making me feel better? It was probably the worst thing I could have done. I think the exercise over the past months had really been keeping the doldrums at bay. I had started walking before I lost my accounting “day job” at the end of last September. Now it was the middle of June and I couldn’t get out bed in the morning. I had been popping out of bed around 7ish and walking but from June until, well last week, if I got out of bed by 8:30 it was a good day. I forced myself to not sleep past 9a during the week and I kept my promise, mostly, about watching television during the day.
Unfortunately, what crept in with the lack of exercise was bad food choices. I am not a dieter by nature. I gave that up with self-loathing in the early 90’s. (That doesn’t mean I won’t go on my version of Atkins from time to time. Lots of good veggies and protein. More on that another time.) I would eat well in the morning and usually well in the afternoon. Sometimes I would skip breakfast and have a big lunch. Then I would eat a late dinner. I was eating fast food (not McDonald’s), which I don’t even like. But it would be an easy dinner. Eggplant pizza. Cookies from Trader Joe’s. In retrospect, it wasn’t a lot of bad food. (Except for this one Mexican place…) There is nothing like falling into a vat of Mexican food because you feel bad. It’s the perfect vicious circle of feeling bad. You fall in because you feel bad and then you feel bad because you fell into the crispy, cheesy, guacamole covered vat of tasty goodness. It was occasional bad food and too much good food and way, way too many carbs. I was carb stoned most of the time. I felt tired even after many hours of sleep. And, I found I was hating myself a bit. It wasn’t like it was in my past. I am much more informed. More than anything I was sad.
As I have said in many of blog posts, I keep looking at what’s next in my life. For the past few months, it all kind of felt like my life was at a stand still. I feel like I need to say, that even in the depths of despair, I was feeling, I was and am incredibly grateful for my life. I have good friends, an amazing husband, and a great family. My health is really good. Which for many is surprising. I find their shock annoying. That should be an entry in itself.
I was down visiting my folks last month. Yes, visiting my mom in the middle of this could have been a recipe for disaster. It wasn’t. Mostly it was really nice being with them. There was, of course, an incident. We were going to go to dinner. My mother insisted we take her car. Yes, it’s a lovely car. I just don’t fit comfortably in it. Which makes no freakin’ sense! How am I bigger than some Germans?! Anyway, we ended up taking her car. Why? Because even at my age, with my Mom, it’s the Golden Rule. She wanted to take her car, so, we took her car. On the way to dinner I sat in the front and Pop sat in the back. I told him we would switch on the way back. I packed myself into the front seat. Then snapped the seat belt around my body and sat motionless…kind of stuck. After dinner, I went to get into the back seat and, well, there wasn’t a chance I was going to get into the back seat of that car! I put the seat back forward and tried to climb into the back. I put one foot in the back and then nothing. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t squeeze into the back of this car. WTF!!! I tried moving the seat forward but it wouldn’t move. This was it. I stood in the parking lot imagining all the people walking to their cars watching my giant rear end hanging out of the side of this car as I tried desperately to force myself into the back seat. All the while my mother is in the driver’s seat and Pop, well, he had the best view. He graciously got in the back seat and I got back into the sardine can front seat and off we went. To say that I was unhappy in that moment would be a great understatement. It’s possible I was doing something wrong with the seat and I might actually be able to get back there. Of course, I wonder how it will be to get out of the back seat of that car. I suppose my mother wouldn’t be too pleased if we had to use the jaws of life to get me out. Then again, it would be a lesson learned.
I have been thinking a lot about fitting in. Where do I fit in? Both literally and figuratively and here I was with my ass sticking out of the side of this Mercedes in a public parking lot. It wasn’t my happiest moment. Where do I fit? Where don’t I fit? Neither of these questions are necessarily bad things. It’s okay if I don’t fit in the back of my mother’s car. Now, I know. But I would have liked to have known without having to learn the hard way. I know I barely fit in airplane bathrooms. Lesson learned. I know I fit on all the rides at Disneyland but the ET ride at Universal; forget it! Those are literal questions. Where do I fit in life? Do I fit in with my friends? Do I fit in in public places? How do people feel about me? I had that person write derogatory comments to me after one of my entries here. I have had mean things said to me in public. People are fascinating. Why do people think it’s okay to say something mean to a person of size or to anyone? I have had strangers approach me and tell me about diets or exercise programs that could “help” me as if I need to be helped. I have gone to the doctor for birth control only to have her “diagnose” me with obesity. As if she were the first person to notice I was fat. She actually wrote it on my insurance form.
The best was a couple of weeks ago. I was in the middle of this state I have been in. Kind of a funk. Kind of a pity party. You know, I don’t have a job. I don’t have money to buy things I want…a new computer, an iPad, etc. It isn’t like I need anything. Anyway, I did a good deed and zipped to the valley for a friend. On the way back I stopped at Pavilion’s aka. Von’s to get some bread and sliced turkey and some of the amazing nectarines they had on sale.
It was 12:45 so people were trying to get sandwiches made for lunch. The woman who helped me didn’t know what she was doing. It was simple…one pound of Primo Taglio mesquite turkey and a half pound of havarti. Another customer who had been there earlier in the day to buy meatloaf got the attention of the woman who was ostensibly helping me, after I had waited in line, and began helping her with her meatloaf. The employee then told me it was going to be a while that I should go shop. Essentially, she stopped helping me to help someone else. Meanwhile, all the people who were in line after me were helped by other Von’s employees.
So, I decided to walk around the store even though I didn’t need much. I grabbed a couple of small artisan flutes and a cluster of tomatoes on the vine. Then I passed an employee who was giving samples of some kind of “brownie bites.” She was talking to a male customer who had a backpack and a small suitcase in his basket. (I saw him wandering the aisles later.) I hesitated to take a brownie bite at first. Did I want a gooey bite of sweet before lunch. Why not?! The employee coaxed me to take one as well. So, I did. I jokingly said, “Well, that was enough. Now, I don’t need to buy them.” Then the other “customer” (and I use the term loosely) says, “People just don’t know how to lose weight properly. They go about it all wrong…you should read this book…” I interrupted him and told him I wasn’t interested. As I turned back to my basket, the employee was poking my artisan bread and she said to me, “That’s no good. That’s what makes you fat. That’s no good!” I shook my head and walked away completely dumbfounded.
Am I so big that I am invisible? Are people embarrassed by me? What do you think when you see fat people? What do you think when you see me? I wonder. Where do I fit? I would love to travel the country and travel the world and find out exactly where do I fit in?
That is the killer line that a lot of fat women get. Even the ones that don’t have a pretty face hear that. It’s always said with the inference being, “but it’s a damn shame about the rest of you!” But that is never said. Okay, it’s rarely said. You can hear it though, “You have such a pretty face…but it’s a damn shame about the rest of you.” Ahh, it makes me curse.
I had an audition today. And, while I am a bit superstitious, for someone who doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff, I will say it was a great experience. It called for someone to be rather tough. My awesome acting coach and I broke it down on Saturday and came up with the word “menacing” to describe her. I worked all weekend on it. Sure, I took breaks. It was the weekend. (Is there really a difference between a weekend and a Monday when you are unemployed? Yes, because my husband is home on the weekends…) I learned the lines and I really got to know the character. So, when I got to the casting office today, 45 minutes early, I decided to stay in my car and work just a bit more. Then I walked through the parking structure and out onto the plaza and then into the building. I figured I had 20 minutes at this point, I should go to the restroom and freshen up and cool off a bit. As I was in the stall reading the lines I hear someone come in and not go into a stall. Then I hear the tell-tale clicking of an iPod wheel. Then I hear really loud music coming from someone’s earphones. They must be deaf. I have to see. I gather my things and step out to the sinks. There before me was this TOUGH woman. She looked like Angela Bassett. She had a muscle shirt on and workout pants and a bandanna on her head. She was definitely menacing. How in the world was I, the Pillsbury dough girl, going to compete with that? She left the restroom before I did. Then I went into the casting room and signed in. Scary-menacing-bandanna lady was standing and staring at her reflection in a window with an, “I fucking dare you” look. Every once in a while she would kind of shift which made me and two other women shift in our seats. The rest of the women were all kinds. I was the largest and had the fairest skin compared to my dark hair. There were red heads and tattooed girls. There were women with long-hair and short hair. It was definitely a slice out of almost every group. Scary-menacing-bandanna-girl went in before me. I could hear a bit of her audition so I walked away. I didn’t want it to affect me. I felt like I gave a good audition. The casting director was BEAUTIFUL. WOW, is she pretty. And, she was very nice and complimentary. She even thanked me for being “so prepared.” As they say, that and $3 will buy me a cup of Starbucks coffee.
moving my car to the street so I could sell the spot when people started driving around in circles looking for parking. Luckily, no one blocked our driveway today. Today they would have been towed. Hell, in my mood, I could have gone out there and pushed a car out of the way. At least I got to see some people in “assless chaps” at the parade. That definitely helped my mood.
In the meantime, I submitted myself to the BBW Model contest. I remember when I was younger I had done it and never heard back. I figured I had nothing to lose sitting in LA hoping to make it as an actor. I submitted photos. And, I did hear back this time. They told me I didn’t make it into their contest but they liked my look and asked that I be a professional model for them. It was a one-time deal. It was a great and memorable experience. At the time, BBW magazine was owned by Larry Flynt. Yes, Larry Flynt of Hustler magazine fame. We shot out in one of his porn studios in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley. Hilarious. They put the mattresses up against the walls so, we would have room to shoot. There were stacks of all kinds of porn magazines filled with images of every fetish you could think of and some you would be grateful to have not thought of. It was a kick. As it turns out, I was the largest model to ever grace the pages of BBW magazine. At least up until that point.
a friend take some pictures of me in lingerie and I submitted them for consideration. Surprisingly, for me, they wanted to use them in their magazine. Then they told me I was going to be on the cover. Within a year I went from being a woman who didn’t date to being a woman on the cover of a mens magazine. Sounds like a Hollywood story to me.