Getting Waisted (14 page)

I was in Jamaica on a paid holiday just because I did backbends on TV. I was amazed by this unexpected gift of good fortune. That was the upside. The downside, and there were a few, was being on a yacht with a group of mostly beautiful bikini-wearing creatures. Dave had neglected to mention that the girls who were coming along were mostly product models. They were all lovely people but they were gorgeous. I realized I was there to be comic relief; every moment of this adventure was being filmed by the Tourist Board for future airings and a guaranteed humiliation for me. Why did I set myself up? Somewhere in the blind spot of my brain, I had deluded myself into believing I would look just as gorgeous: my long blonde hair blowing back from my face as I sat long-legged on the prow of the rented sailboat. Instead, I watched the skin on my short and somewhat stumpy legs turn from white, to fire red, to dangerously blotchy as I sat huddled in a corner near the back of the boat.
Yes, I was wearing sunscreen!
I was becoming overwhelmingly queasy, but it didn’t matter because the gorgeous ones—all the others—had moved up onto the prow and were sipping pastel-colored cocktails with hibiscus flowers in them. I heard the tinkling of glasses and tinkling of laughter. But I was facedown on a bench, desperate to be ignored—no problem there. I was seasick, my matted hair plastered to my clammy face. I felt the camera swooping in for a close-up. I was in no condition to render the cameraman unconscious. I simply succumbed to the embarrassment.

For me it seemed like days later, not hours, when we glided into a slip and everyone hopped off the boat. I hauled myself to my feet and prayed that a rogue wave would sweep me out to sea. No such luck. They had all gone off to cliff dive or ride some G-4 rapids. I was on the beach, happy to be alone and off that damn boat. I was minding my own business, which is not allowed when one is fat. It’s everyone’s business. A beautiful redhead jogged past me wearing a pink string-thing just as I knocked back a slurp from an equally pink Pepto-Bismol bottle and admitted through my queasiness to having the fleeting, okay lingering, thought that if I looked like her, I’d just be wearing earrings. She turned around and began running back toward me. Had I just created a fantasy moment that she and I would body bump, then split apart and both our bodies would be perfect? I knew it was a fantasy but she stopped right in front of me and her big blue eyes gazed into mine . . .
No way! Was she hitting on me?
Don’t go there, there’s no way, but then her hand gently touched mine. I was really confused. In a soft voice, she introduced herself as Melissa, and then said she hoped I wouldn’t be offended. Immediately I tensed up, knowing that somehow I was going to be, “You have a really pretty face and I like to help people.”
Oh Jesus—here it comes:
“I work for the Ayds Candy Company and we have these amazing appetite suppressants. They come in chocolate, chocolate-mint, and yummy butterscotch. They will absolutely kill your appetite. Awesome huh? I’ll give you some samples . . .”

In that instant my seasickness vanished, replaced by a wave of rage, “What makes you think my body is any of your business?” Her face crumpled into confusion.

“Don’t you want to be thin and beautiful?”
Yes, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I did my best to gather up my shattered dignity as I walked away and prayed for quicksand.

The rest of the trip proved to be just as humiliating. The whole group was going to Dunn’s River Falls, a natural wonder that thousands of tourists loved to climb. I felt the wave of fear hit my stomach. I didn’t like to climb anything. I didn’t want to be a poor sport, so I gamely splashed a smile on my face as I joined the throng of vibrantly dressed pilgrims. In front of me was a tour group of seniors, already itching to take their arthritic legs on the big climb to the summit. The sound of the rushing water, the squealing kids and adults, was doing nothing to calm my escalating tension. My group was already hop-skipping and gloating their way to the top. I was on my own. I took in a deep breath, ignoring the warning symptoms of constriction in my rapidly tightening throat. My palms, now sweaty with fear, should have been the second tip off, even if my stone-like legs being welded to the flat rock I was standing on were not. It was like being on a freeway at rush hour with anxious, honking drivers closing in on me. “Could you go a little faster?” I couldn’t go at all. I was stuck literally between a rock and a hard place. I felt the impatient line becoming hostile. I lifted one leg, then the other. I didn’t look up and I couldn’t look down. Like a fat snail, I slowly inched forward. They were breathing down my neck and it was only making things worse. I didn’t respond well to pressure. If my legs had let me, I would have jumped! No flight or fight was to be had here, just a mass of quivering jelly glued to a rock, halfway from the top and halfway from the bottom. I wondered if my mail could be delivered here, because this was now where I lived. A pushy mother of three toddlers yelled at me to, “MOVE!” Another angry voice told me that I was holding up the line.

I was ready to cry but instead I snapped: “There shouldn’t be a line! We are in the middle of a freaking natural wonder.” I took a few panicked staccato breaths and pushed forward another five steps. Why was I so terrified? I stopped and clutched an outcropping of rocks to let the never-ending parade of climbers squeeze past me on their journey upward, as an equally long parade made their way back down—like a busy colony of nonstop worker ants programmed to carry their trail mixes to the top, and their empty cellophane bags back down. I was paralyzed. I was stuck.
Oh, a metaphor
. . . For a microsecond my neck unfroze, and I looked up to see my party of bikinied wonders all staring down at me. Warm pity flooded their faces. A park ranger appeared at my side like Gandhi. He put one arm around me and pulled me close, so I couldn’t really see in front of me. He gently and firmly guided me down from the ledge, softly talking me through each step.

When we got down to the bottom, the wild applause competed with the volume from the rushing falls. Were they clapping because the obstruction was off the mountain, or because they were genuinely happy to see the concrete melt from my feet? It didn’t matter, I was just so grateful to be at sea level. I promised myself to commit to memory that it was my imagination that was agile, not my feet. It was then I saw my new archenemy; the persistent cameraman had captured every second of my personal hell on film.

The makeup department on my show was not happy with me when I got home. They had to slap a primer over my peeling skin, somewhat like a plaster base, to smooth out the bumps before they could apply my makeup. My guest speaker that day was a renowned endocrinologist. He was there to talk about metabolism and I was hoping he’d tell me mine was slow and therefore give me a pass on my weight. He didn’t. He basically told me to move more and eat less.
Thank you. Tell me something I don’t know
. Shockingly, he did. I told him I had been doing The Last Chance Diet. Immediately, a stricken look crossed his face and he made it clear that he hoped I was no longer messing around with something so nutritionally unsound and dangerous. He told me, the yummy strawberry shake was made of ground animal byproducts like hooves, tendons, and horns and that of the some 2 to 4 million people that had tried the diet, at least fifty-eight had suffered heart attacks while on it.

Once over my shock, I finished the show putting extra effort into my knee squats and bicycle kicks as if to ward off any impending evil, or the possible damage I might have brought on myself while on the diet from hell.

13

Not Always a Picnic

Diet #17
Life’s a Picnic

Cost
$350.00

Weight lost
11 pounds

Weight gained
Couldn’t even look

After the last monstrous diet insanity,
and the three before that, I vowed to be more sensible and do as the endocrinologist had advised; just eat less and exercise more. A normal person would have simply made a weekly grocery list and gone to the market, coming home with healthy food and nothing else. I went to the market armed with my list and my best intentions but then I arrived at the freezer section where there were several new items: from easy-heat cream cheese and apple blintzes to Sara Lee’s whole section of mouthwatering desserts. I grabbed a couple with the intention of having just one nibble a night. Ninety-six dollars later I was lugging bags through my front door. I had all the healthy options, but deep down in the bags, well hidden, hopefully from myself, were the high-calorie goodies. These weren’t really impulse buys, they were necessities in case my mother had a flip-out over my father’s worsening condition, or for any of life’s unexpected beat-downs. Some people build fallout shelters, some keep earthquake provisions in the trunks of their cars; in my case, the refrigerator was my escape hatch, stocked with all the emergency rations a person could need to ward off most demons. But what was my problem? I really needed to understand
why
food was my touchstone. I came from a good, if somewhat crazy, family—
doesn’t everyone?
I had great friends and I had a couple of great careers going on. I had some troubles—
doesn’t everyone?
I had an appetite. I’m not talking Hannibal Lecter here, but in this world, having any kind of appetite is considered a crime.

It dawned on me that should I ever get an urge to commit a real crime, like hold up a bank, the picture on the bank’s grainy surveillance camera might actually be recognizable. Hundreds of squirrely-faced, bank-robbing nobodies could get away with satchels of money, but even if I had a stocking mask over my face I’d still be made: “Large-size woman lumbering, looks like she’s got queen-size support hose on her head.” I know even a geriatric security guard would be able to take me down. I hate running, everything bangs and bounces. Worst-case scenario: the guard might shoot me and then I’d make the eleven o’ clock news. My family would see the humongous chalk outline where my body once lay, and they’d know instantly that it was me.

I still hadn’t answered my question. Why was food my go-to? Could it be some kind of peer pressure thing? Was I unconsciously rebelling against the power of the media, always pushing perfection on every magazine cover, billboard, television commercial. Was I really that insecure, that shallow? I didn’t want to believe it but
. . . yes! Who would I be if I had been gifted with a great body? A pole-dancer? An exhibitionist? It was impossible to know because I was filtering it through my
wanna-be
brain. Or was it that I was weak? Lacking in willpower. How often had I heard; “Get a grip and push away from the table.” It might have been wiser for me to stuff my ears instead of my body. A win-win; I wouldn’t be able to hear the haters and really, they wouldn’t be there if I knew how to push away from the table. Too much thinking was making me hungry.

I had enough girlfriends to know that even the near perfect ones only saw their flaws, magnified as if they could be seen from space. “Oh my God, look at my ass—It’s huge.” Every mirror was Judas. It lied and betrayed, showing everything through a distorted prism. I knew intellectually when my friends looked at me, as when I looked at them, we saw our personalities, our hearts, and our souls. But still when we looked at ourselves, we saw only fat! I could see Katja, with her perfect body, look at herself and see that she hated her thighs. She kept pulling her sweater down over them. My sister, also blessed with a great figure, fixated on her little tummy pooch with complete disgust. In her eyes, it was a giant jelly-bellied monster! Why were we so hard on ourselves? Why did it matter if we were a bit thick around the middle as long as we were not thick in the head? Why did we care so much if we had a double chin? Or had less than perfect arms? Why did we all want to be line drawings?

Imperfection is beauty
Madness is genius
And it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous,
Than absolutely boring.

—Marilyn Monroe

I decided if a gorgeous woman like Marilyn thought that, then I needed to do a better job with my thoughts. I stopped dieting and tried living. That lasted two and a half months—just long enough to eat my way through my emergency supplies, restock, and do it again.

Fate intervened in the way of another potential job. I was summoned to meet a charismatic character by the name of Chris Bearde, a producer who was in town from Los Angeles. He was looking for someone with personality and humor to be a regular on the
Bobby Vinton Show
for CBS. We immediately hit it off and I was hired to begin the following month.

I did what I always did. I immediately went looking for a new and better diet, one that was not crazy. I scoured every newspaper and magazine until I found a diet tacked up on my local supermarket billboard; “The Life’s a Picnic Diet” consisted of three meals and two snacks delivered to your door. If I never had to enter a kitchen or a restaurant, if those places were made obsolete, maybe then I would be fine. No danger zones. No temptation. But much like room service, diet delivery meals didn’t come cheap. Apparently you needed to have a million dollars lying around, so that some person could deliver three teeny weeny, perfectly balanced feasts in specially designed, reusable miniature picnic baskets. I sold an heirloom cameo in 22 karat gold just to afford that picnic. (I had precious few of those, so it had better work.) Of course, I would need money to stay in the “Life’s a Picnic” world, lots of money; either I’d have to inherit it, marry it, or make it myself, and since all of the above were unlikely, I would have to go into debt, or learn to cook.

Three weeks later, I arrived at my dressing room for my new TV job, feeling pretty proud of my eleven pounds lost and more than a little self-righteous until I saw my costume. It was a brightly colored and heavily padded dirndl with an oversized puffy-sleeved blouse and an opera singer’s Wagnerian Valkyrie helmet attached with fake blonde pigtails. In my excitement, I clearly hadn’t listened to the entire job description. It was my job to escort the featured guest star onstage by way of a polka. The celebrity
du jour
would then, reading from the cue cards, hurl a fat joke or insult at me. I twirled Don Rickles to his mark, center stage. He looked me over, “Hey kid, what did you do, swallow a stove?” I was devastated. They had hired me only because I was fat! I lasted a season and a half. After the first season, I quit, but CBS wanted the show just as it was. The producer made promises that this time it would be different. They didn’t know what a terrific comedienne I was when they hired me. They wooed and cajoled and I fell for it. I was naive and inexperienced in the big, self-serving world of show biz. Oh, they gave me sketches to do; when Phyllis Diller couldn’t show up, I got to do her sketches but they wanted them delivered exactly the way Phyllis would have done them and even back then Phyllis was old. I was a girl in my twenties, and I still had to polka out the guest stars and endure their cheap shots at my expense. I didn’t care if I ever worked in that medium again, so their threats fell on my deaf ears and I quit for the second time. This time they really were unable to convince me to return. They offered it to John Candy. He turned them down. I should have done my homework; Chris Bearde was the man who created
The Gong Show.

From then on, I was far more conscientious about what jobs I would take and I swore to never again be the butt of anyone’s joke.