You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl

by Rivenbark, Celia

  “There’s some weird shit goin’ on up in here,” the man said. I nodded in agreement.

  Winners were announced in elementary, middle, and high school divisions, plus some kids won special trophies donated by local industries. One little girl, about eight years old, won four different trophies. Her parents squealed and did high fives. Every time. The couple beside me looked down at their daughter who was, at this point, sobbing into her best Sunday dress, having realized that she’d lost the elementary round.

  “Take her for ice cream,” I told my new friend.

  “Only if I can get beer, too,” he said grimly.

  It’s true, I thought to myself. All the good ones really are taken.

  On the way out, there was some sobbing—by the parents. One parent comforted a distraught mom by saying that, “It’s obvious that these judges had no clue what makes a good project at state!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No clue! They got no clue!”

  “That’s right,” she said, sniffling a bit. “What was your project?”

  I’m not proud of what happened next. Why couldn’t I have just been honest about the project that the Princesses had worked on for the better part of four weeks, taking breaks only long enough to talk for a few hours about how awesomely ripped Taylor Lautner is.

  How could I fancy up this suddenly plain-Jane science fair project? I couldn’t just talk about chips and dip and then redipping and how it’s all icky and germy.

  “Oh, my daughter and her friend tested the, uh, molecular structure, of the, uh, bacterium posterity of the random accelerated protein inhibitor, uh, rubric.”

  I’ve discovered that if you put “rubric” in any conversation, you automatically sound smarter. Try it.

  While I thought that sounded pretty good for something on the fly, it was obvious that I was faking it. The woman nodded quickly, then skittered down the hall where she was comforted with a big hug from the mom of a little boy who had built a hand-blown glass harmonica and PowerPointed a presentation demonstrating how well he could play Canon in D on it. I knew the boy and knew that he had done every single bit of the work by himself. And he hadn’t won. See idiot judges above.

  As predicted, this would be the end of the line for our little family. Clutching the trifold board and accompanying handouts, we walked out of the auditorium and into the freezing February night. There was no time for regrets. The truth is, we lost to a kid whose project title made us look at each other and say, “Do whaaaaat?” The little shit clearly deserved to win and advance to district, possibly even state, nation, and Interplanetary King of the Universe science fair.

  Wrapping my arm around her shoulders, I looked the Princess in the eye.

  She looked a little down, I thought.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” I said. “We’ll get ’em next year!”

  “No we won’t,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  16

  What’s Farsi for “Stay Outta My Love Life”?

  As a churchgoing woman, I’m getting more than a little tired of hearing about all these pastors who are instructing their congregations to, well, do it. And do it a lot.

  As we Southern Methodists like to say, “Settle down, Reverend, you’ve done gone from preachin’ into meddlin’.

  It’s a trend, hons, and I’m here to tell you that it’s scarier than the words “First Dude Todd Palin.” Nah, I’m kidding. Nothing’s scarier than that. (Except, perhaps, that I just this morning learned that pumpernickel, which I love, is literally translated to mean “goblin who breaks wind.” Scary, right?)

  But getting back to bidness, the Associated Press reports that ministers in Kansas, Florida, and Texas have asked, nay, instructed, ordained, and decreed, that their married congregants make hot monkey love for up to thirty days in a row.

  Now I totally get that you’d do that in Kansas, because once basketball season winds down, really, what else is there to do? Take your time answering that; I’ll wait. Still waiting. But Florida? Did they shut down Disney and nobody told me?

  In Texas, the Reverend Ed Young has challenged couples in his Dallas church to have seven straight days of sex. Upon hearing this, a Tampa minister said he’d recommend thirty straight days of sex. Big D, indeed. I’m guessing Rev. Young will up the ante to “Every married couple will have sex every day for ten years period, so nanny nanny boo boo, stick your head in doo doo.”

  And while I like a little healthy competition in most things, this seems more than a tad intrusive. Here’s how I look at it: At my church, we recently had a contest between all the Sunday school classes to see which class could bring in the most cans of soup for the local food pantry. Bottom line: I don’t think the homeless give a happy damn if a bunch of Methodists they don’t even know personally are feet-to-Jesus thirty days a month just because the preacher says we should be, but I’m pretty sure they’re fired up about those twenty-four hundred cans of soup.

  Pastor Bob is a fine fella in every way (except a pesky allegiance to the vile Duke Blue Devils, owing to an unfortunate stint at divinity school there), but I can tell you that if he ever stood up in the pulpit and instructed us to “get busy,” I’d run outta there like my clothes were on fire.

  So, yes, I’m grateful not to be in the Kansas congregation of the Reverend Timmy Gibson, who recently asked his church members to have sex every day during the month of February. I’m guessing he selected February because it’s the month of love, also groundhogs, but I’m guessing he was thinking about love.

  The icky thing was he didn’t call it sex. He called it “hanky-panky.”

  Hanky-panky?

  This calls to mind the practiced faux blush of Bob Eubanks, host of the old Newlywed Game back in the ’70s. (Quick aside: Remember the classic question when ol’ Bob asked, “Gentlemen, what do you think your wife would say would be the most unusual place you’ve ever made whoopee?” and, sure enough, one of the more candid husbands proudly held up a card that read, “In the butt.”)

  Indeed.

  You’re probably wondering why preachers care so much about their parishioners’ sex life when there are obviously so many more pressing problems that the world’s spiritual leaders need to address. And by spiritual leaders, I’m not talking about that loony Pat Robertson who thinks the Haitians deserve to die in earthquakes because they sold their souls to the devil. What a tool.

  The answer is simple: These ministers believe that all marriages will improve through better intimacy.

  That’s right. Nothing says better intimacy quite like duty sex, am I right?

  Rev. Gibson defends the trend by saying that sex is a topic that should be talked about from a biblical perspective.

  Verily, I say to thee, it is not. Sex is a topic that should be talked about between two consenting adults after a couple of glasses of decent grocery store wine and maybe a foot massage.

  Look it up. I think it’s in Ephesians somewhere.

  This sort of foolishness gives religion a bad name. The same way that Mark Sanford did. (Yes, yes, I’m not ready to leave him quite yet. He is, after all, the one who said he wished he’d kept his “genie in the bottle,” which was simply too delicious to resist making fun of.)

  Sanford, or Dope Pius, as I like to call him, tried to put a religious spin on his affair with the Argentinean Hoochita. When he visited her in New York, they went to church and took along his spiritual advisor.

  Sanford’s affair, then, is somehow a spiritual, God-sanctioned tryst? To hear him tell it, it was the same old tired story that so many of us have lived: You go to Uruguay with a bunch of your congressmen friends, you decide to go clubbing, you lock eyes across the dance floor with a woman with teasing tan lines, and you spend the rest of the evening murdering the salsa as only a middle-aged white man can.

  Yes, clearly, so far it’s God’s will. Sanford eventually took Hoochita, his announced “soul mate” (pausing to gag a little here) to church services. In his defense, Sanford did ask
his wife, Jenny, to join them on this trip, but she wisely took a pass, perhaps quashing forever Sanford’s hopes for a threesome and the chance to write the letter he’d always dreamed of writing: “Dear Penthouse Forum, I’m the embattled governor of a small Southern state and I never thought this would happen to me … .”

  Religion and sex shouldn’t be discussed in public, not by preachers and certainly not by lovesick Southern governors who are thinking with only one branch of government, if you get my drift.

  Mingling sex and religion is bad enough, but when it’s used for national security, things get really squirrely.

  When the CIA realized they needed Taliban information, they came up with a plan to bribe the old warlords—whose religion encourages them to have many young wives—with Viagra.

  You thought money and guns would be sufficient? That’s so 2002.

  For someone like me, whose knowledge of CIA covert operations comes exclusively from Get Smart (the old TV show and the movie, so it’s not like I’m a complete moron), this was quite a revelation.

  Sneaking little blue pills to the pooped old Afghan chieftains would’ve never occurred to me. If I wanted to get some Taliban intelligence, I would have, like any good daughter of the South, shown up with bribery in the form of an attractively garnished deviled egg plate or perhaps a red velvet cake.

  Since the Afghan chieftains have many wives, per their wacko religion, and some of those wives are distressingly young, the CIA decided to get in bed with, so to speak, the old warlords and give ’em something they couldn’t get anywhere else.

  “We wanted to keep them firmly on our side,” a CIA agent said, with nary a hint of irony.

  Before Viagra became the bartering tool of choice, the CIA had been using less inventive strategies, such as trading tooth extractions for Taliban supply route information. Now to you and me, who are used to getting our teeth removed in sanitary offices by men and women with many boats and homes to pay for, this doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal, but you have to remember that things are a bit more primitive in Afghanistan. Their oral surgeons usually have only one boat to pay for at most.

  Clearly Viagra is a lot more fun than getting your teeth yanked out of your head with implements most likely involving slammed doors and long pieces of string.

  Yes, a lot more fun. Said the old Afghan chieftains after a few days of Love, American Style: “Me likey.” Or something like that. Gawd, it’s not like I can speak Farsi, I mean except for basic stuff like “Where is the bathroom?” or “Do y’all have a Pizza Slut up in here?” Important shit like that.

  Thanks to American ingenuity, the Afghan bigwigs have a spring in their steps and the newly dissed Taliban is left scratching its collective turban and wondering what the hell went wrong with their supply routes.

  Hey! Maybe this is the way to finally lure Osama out of the hills at long last. Just leave a trail of little blue pills at the mouth of his cave and he’ll follow them all the way into the waiting paddy wagon.

  Mission freakin’ accomplished.

  Of course, while some have praised the CIA’s brilliant plan, no one has really spoken up for the young wives, who, bless their hearts, were probably thrilled that their husband didn’t have any lead in his pencil, so to speak. Now that they have his CIA-induced groove back, the wives will be expected to service the old goats. Since many, if not all, of these young wives aren’t exactly the result of a committed, caring relationship involving mutual love and respect, this introduces a major ick factor into the entire arrangement.

  No matter whether it’s coming from a pulpit in Kansas or a CIA operative knocking on a tent door with a gleam in his eye, mixing religious beliefs and mooney-gooney isn’t good for anybody.

  And, in the long run, it’s even scarier than pumpernickel.

  17

  Give Us Your Poor, Your Tired, Your Kinda Creepy Masses

  As I write this, Bernie Madoff is getting settled into his new prison-home just up the road from me here in North Carolina. I’m tempted to make him a banana pudding or something.

  And by “something,” I mean a layer cake made entirely of poo.

  When new neighbors move to “the southern part of heaven,” we generally go to great pains to make them feel welcome. Usually, we’ll give them a couple of days to settle in, and then we’ll show up with a butter pecan pound cake, still warm from the oven, or perhaps pimento cheese made from some long-dead aunt’s secret recipe. (The secret is usually a splash of Grand Marnier, but don’t tell anyone I told you.)

  But Madoff’s swindling of the innocent and the greedy alike to the tune of $50 billion has left me feeling less than charitable when it comes to welcoming our new and most infamous resident. Other North Carolinians feel the same way. Truth be told, I don’t think Madoff could be any more reviled if he’d shown up at Butner Federal Correctional Complex toting an oil portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman to hang on his cell wall.

  Madoff isn’t happy to be here in the Good Old North State, whose motto, incidentally, is Esse Quam Videri which might as well be “Baaaah, Ram, Ewe” for all I can remember from seventh-grade state history. But I think it had to do with being an upright soul. Which he clearly isn’t.

  Madoff was exiled to North Carolina despite repeated pleas to let him stay in a federal prison much closer to his Manhattan home. All y’all say “Awwwwww.” What can I tell you, Bernie? Some things in life, like having to eat Fancy Feast and ramen noodles because somebody stole all your retirement savings, just aren’t fair, are they?

  Bright side: Your new digs near the Research Triangle Park (where we keep our smartest Yankees) are just a short ninety-minute drive down I-40 from The World’s Largest Frying Pan. Not that you’ll ever see it, bless your old-ass thieving heart.

  Bernie, while you will never get to enjoy all that our lovely state has to offer, that’s certainly not true of your wife, Ruth. Why, pray tell, isn’t the missus down here scoping out a new home? May I suggest the trailer park not far from Butner? It’s the one where, not that long ago, one brother fatally stabbed another over who would get the last fried pork chop on the platter.

  Yep, that sounds about right.

  I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for Ruth Madoff except when I see those photos of her leaving the prison on visiting day and see that her roots are clearly no longer being scrupulously maintained by Enrique of Park Avenue, or whomever, for more money than the average Family Dollar store manager makes in a year.

  It wasn’t just me who noticed that Ruth’s roots were being neglected. The New York Times reported that she’s been barred from her favorite salon as well as booted from her gym, personal florist, and even her favorite Italian bistro. Oh, no! Not the personal florist!

  Well, it’s like they say: When God closes one (cell) door, he just opens up a window. (Settle down, Bernie, I’m speaking metaphorically here.) If Ruth moves down here, she can get to know the floral stylists at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store closest to Butner. There, she will find a splendid selection of posies, some even accented by spray glitter at no additional charge! We Southerners have an irrational fondness for spray glitter, even those of us who like to pretend that we’re above that sort of tacky display. You have not lived ’til you’ve seen my great Aunt Lu-Dean’s holiday table with glitter-sprayed magnolia leaves glued to clothespins for place card holders.

  It’s a freakin’ vision.

  So, yes, Ruth, the Piggly Wiggly can answer your floral needs. Sure, you might think you don’t like blue carnations now, but they’ll grow on you and, best of all, they’re just 50 cents apiece with your hawg heaven discount card!

  If Ruth Madoff does decide to move to North Carolina to avoid those tiring trips to visit Bernie in the pokey, she will need to weigh in, sooner or later, on that most holy of matters in this state. We don’t let just anybody in here. Well, sometimes we do. John Edwards’ mistress is fluffing new pillows at her beach digs not far from here, bless her fornicatin’ heart.

  R
uth Madoff, Reille Hunter, and anyone else who moves to North Carolina will be allowed to settle in and get their bearings a little bit before someone, eventually, asks them that most important question: Do you prefer your barbecue with the pungent vinegar-based sauce of the Eastern part of the state or do you enjoy the odious tomato-based sauce favored by everyone else? What? Ruth Madoff doesn’t eat barbecue on account of being Jewish? Holy Hadassah, Batgirl! I smell deal breaker.

  I have to give Ruth props for standing by her jerk-of-a-man despite constantly being photographed and scrutinized. A recent photo showed her clutching a Ziploc bag full of cash on her way out of Butner, reminding me of a scene in The Sopranos where it was clear that even though mobster Johnny Sack was in jail, he made sure his beloved Ginny would never be without cash.

  Which is not to imply that Bernie Madoff has any ties to organized crime whatsoever. No, surely organized crime has some standards.

  North Carolina seems to have had its share of the spotlight this year, but we lost out to Mississippi when it came to being host state for Tiger Woods’ sexual rehab clinic.

  Too bad. We were going for the trifecta of creepy new residents but Mississippi snuck in there and stole Tiger from us with its much lauded Gentle Path sex-addict program, which included, I kid you not, an obstacle course among the pine trees to “boost self-esteem.”

  Dude. For starters, if there’s anyone who can come out of the pine trees with a win, it’s Tiger. Just ask Phil Mickelson. And self-esteem? I’m thinking that is soooo not a problem for him. Yes, yes, I get the whole poor little lonesome boy inside seeking validation in all the wrong places and a bevy of unresolved issues from growing up fast and famous, but have you seen Tiger’s wife? Elin Woods has managed to do the impossible: make me feel genuinely sorry for a billionaire Swedish bikini model.

  So, no, I don’t buy it, Sigmund Floyd. I think Tiger’s got sex addiction the same way I got molten lava chocolate cake addiction. He loves it. It’s awesome. It makes his thighs all dimply. Oh, sorry, maybe that was just the cake.