Everybody I know is on a diet these days. Sugar Busters, Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast. I could never do that last one because I have absolutely no idea what they mean by “a sensible dinner at night.” Does that mean I have to eat while wearing low heels and, ha-ha, balancing my, whatchamacallit, checkbook?
My best friend is addicted to dieting. Right now, she’s dreading her twenty-fifth high-school reunion because she fears she will be the only one there who has (a) gained more than eight ounces and (b) now sees Woodstock as just a muddy mess of fornicating weirdos with too much armpit hair.
What can I tell you? She’s lost her soul.
Happily, she’s also lost about twelve pounds so far thanks to some awful combination of tomatoes, grapefruit, and beefsteaks the size of whale bladders.
“Tee-hee, I can eat all the meat I can hold!” she told me last week, while chewing on a leg of lamb and chasing it with a greasy turkey drumstick. In church.
The theory behind the eat-meat-diet craze is that you cut out all those nasty old carbohydrates, which lay hidden like Clinton conquests in an Arkansas trailer park until—gotcha!—they pop out, morph into sugar, and make you blubbery overnight.
Of course, there’s just one little catch.
“You can’t live without carbohydrates,” I told my friend. “They give you energy. I read that somewhere or maybe it was on Orca, I mean Oprah.”
But my friend had stopped listening by then. Exhausted, she dropped her head to her chest and began to snore loudly.
This is the worst thing since we were pudgy single-somethings who tried The Seven-Day Miracle Cabbage Soup Diet and both of us dang near exploded. Sure, we lost weight but no one—and I mean not even the loser guys who don’t take their ballcaps off in the Western Sizzlin’—wanted to be around us.
It’s a cabbage thing—you wouldn’t understand.
I’ll admit that fad dieting sounds great in theory. My favorite wacko diet claims you can take a little vitamin-packed pill at night that ACTUALLY CHEWS UP FAT CELLS AND SPITS THEM OUT WHILE YOU SLEEP.
I’m no genius but I believe the only way you can lose weight by taking a pill and going to sleep is if Jack Kevorkian’s in the room.
Pills don’t eat fat cells. The only thing that gets rid of fat is a low-fat diet and exercise. Of course, that’s bor-ing. It’s much more fun to envision yourself romping on the beach like Shari Belafonte after tanking up on shakes all day.
Another Slim-Fast spokesmodel is a Real-Life Mom, who whines that she couldn’t lose weight after her baby was born. The before-and-after photos are impressive but unrealistic.
There is no way you can lose weight with a toddler in the house. This is because whatever they don’t eat, you must finish. Heck, sometimes I don’t even wait.
“Hey! You through with that?” I ask the toddler while she’s guarding the last of her Easy Mac. “Don’t you have some TV to watch or something?”
Dieters recently had great news when the Associated Press reported that a study had found—and I am not making this up—PIZZA AND BEER ARE GOOD FOR YOU! I haven’t been this happy since my step class was canceled and we all went out for Taco Bell Grande Meals instead.
The story said researchers believe the tomato sauce in pizza can prevent prostate cancer and the, uh, beer in beer can prevent ulcers.
I can’t wait to tell my friend. If she ever wakes up.
The High School Reunion
The invitation to my own twenty-fifth high school reunion came this week. I’d hoped we could skip this one and go straight to the fortieth with its inevitable talk of grandchildren, which route everybody drove, and how the kids with those danged thumper cars make so much noise you can hardly hear what Dick van Dyke’s saying in Diagnosis Murder.
I was going to skip the reunion but then I got The News: my Serious High School Boyfriend, whom I haven’t seen since graduation, is coming with his lovely and talented wife, who has had a boob lift, I kid you not.
Hey, it’s not like I’m boiling a bunny on this guy’s stove or anything, but let’s just say I’ve kept track of him over the years.
When we were in high school, I was obsessed with Serious Boyfriend. He wore loooong brown hair to his waist, a kinda stinky suede coat with 8-inch fringe, and a puka shell necklace.
Today, he’d make Austin Powers look like a GQ poster boy, but back in the Frampton years he was “far out.”
The ultimate disappointment is that S.B. is probably going to show up driving the biggest gas-guzzling, ozone-eating sport utility monster in the parking lot, and I will get silly on umbrella drinks wondering what happened to the guy with the peace-symbol headband who used to explain Jethro Tull lyrics to me.
(“See, ‘Aqualung’ is a metaphor for the poor, disenfranchised, and dispirited part of our collective souls,” he would start, while I was just thinking, “Yakkety, yakkety, yak, does this guy have the grooviest ice-blue eyes you’ve ever seen or what? OHMIGOD!”)
Okay, gotta pull myself together here. After all, I’m a respectable married lady and mother of one who, while never tapped for the Junior League, is a card-carrying member of the prestigious J. C. Penney Bra and Panty Club.
Let’s just say I’ve done pretty well for myself. There’s no need to sweat over a silly old class reunion.
Still, as soon as I heard S.B. had sent in his registration, I called my hairdresser and close personal friend, Brenda, which we pronounce “Branda.”
So Branda says to me, “Don’t sweat it girl-FRAN.” (I love hairdresser lingo. I always feel so safe and cozy with someone who knows my roots better’n Aunt Mamie, the genealogy guru in our family who has been known to get so engrossed in her work that she answers the door wearing her pantyhose AND NOTHING ELSE.)
Anyhow, I explained to Branda that I had to look “outta sight!” for the twenty-fifth class reunion. I also told her that I had forgiven her for that time not too long ago when I said I wanted hair just like on Dharma and Greg and she made me look like Greg.
Next stop in my pre-reunion panic was my best friend and clothing advisor, Sue-Ellen, who, when she gets real excited, will excuse herself and quickly throw up. Afterward, she told me she ran into her own S.B. at her recent thirtieth class reunion (you didn’t think I’d have a best friend who is younger than me did you?) and she was all tongue-tied.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “At least you’ve got fair warning. You know how I get when I’m excited.”
I groaned out loud picturing Sue-Ellen making a mad dash for the ladies’ room across a jam-packed Ramada conference room-slash-grand ballroom, nearly knocking over twenty-five pounds of sesame chicken wings in the process.
Sue-Ellen said that I should be concentrating on chitchat, not losing fourteen pounds in the next twenty-one days.
“My big mistake was that I had nothing clever to say, so I just stood there and blathered about how it sure had been a long time and he said it sure had been, and then I said I was going to try the crab balls, and he said wonder where they get those, and I said ‘eyuk.’”
That night, I watched 60 Minutes and listened to public radio to find out what was going on in the world so I could segue artfully from “Yes, it has been a long time and you look just the same, too” to a thoughtful discussion on Y2K, Kosovo, and an obscure Ukranian opera singer.
My husband, not the jealous type, thinks it’s all a big joke.
Although, truthfully, he’s so immersed in the NBA playoffs, he wouldn’t notice if I invited Andy Rooney over for a threesome.
“I can’t wait for you to meet my high school sweetheart,” I said during halftime of the forty-fifth game between the Knicks and Pacers.
“Is this the guy with the puka shells?”
“Well, yeah.”
“The one with the smelly coat and pretentious ‘Aqualung’ explanation? The one who dumped you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s an idiot.”
Sometimes they know just what to say, don’t they?
&nbs
p; Fleeing Floyd
It was supposed to be a four-day getaway sans toddler at a glitzy casino hotel in Atlantic City. I was going to wear “borreyed” sequins and everything.
Floyd changed those vacation plans. About the time I should have been settling in at the blackjack tables, drinking a goofy umbrella drink and feeling downright reckless for a Methodist, I was, instead, driving my husband’s Jeep, white-knuckled, along Interstate 40, sometimes traveling two miles in two hours.
My parents, my two-year-old, and I were fleeing Floyd, headed for the Virginia line and the pot of gold that is the last room at the Days Inn.
“Are we theeeeerrrrre yet?”
“How many more miiiiiilllles?”
“I have to go potty.”
And that was just my parents.
The toddler amused herself by systematically smushing eight strawberry Nutrigrain bars into the holes of her car seat buckles and picking her nose.
We decided to stop at The Cracker Barrel because we were all starving to death (the car seat, however, would not need to eat for days). It’s an unwritten rule that if three generations are traveling together in the same vehicle, they must, at some point, decide that eating at The Cracker Barrel is a terrific idea.
It is not.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. That whole corn-shuckin’, cutesey, “good kissin’ don’t last, good cookin’ do” wall plaque mentality is fine unless you’ve got a small child along.
The Cracker Barrel is beloved by highway travelers so there is ALWAYS a twenty-minute wait. You could go there at two A.M. and there would be fifty people of various ages sitting in the rockers out front. Even normally sane city folk are overcome with an indescribable urge to whittle.
The Cracker Barrel is known for providing a cozy, countrified store full of knickknacks for you to peruse while you wait the required twenty minutes for a seat in the “faincy eatin’ room.” Of course, this is brilliant marketing. Before the restaurant could call us on the loudspeaker (and don’t you love how they say: “The Cracker Barrel WELCOMES the Higgenbottoms, party of four!”) my daughter had three separate screaming, leg-kicking tantrums right on ye old heart pine plank flooring.
Naturally, being a stickler for discipline and not wanting this wretched hurricane to undo months of patient but firm parenting skills, I bought ONLY the items she wanted: a Mickey Mouse-emblazoned all-day sucker as big as a dinner plate ($2.95), a battery-operated squirrel tail attached to a ball that rolls around like it’s on rodent crack ($7.50), and a disgusting, candy-filled noisemaker thingamabob that danged near drove us all insane ($3.50).
“Will that be all for y’all?” asked the poetic clerk at the cash register, which looked oddly out of place at this place where even Yankees find themselves saying things like, “We’re purtinear our exit.”
I don’t remember eating. In under fifteen seconds, the toddler had the squirrel tail unwrapped and was dipping it in my steaming bowl of “gooder’n homemade” vegetable-beef soup.
My parents huffed that they’d never known anyone who didn’t enjoy eating at The Cracker Barrel and what on earth kind of nut case had they raised?
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or whittle.
Big Fake Breasts
By now you’ve all heard and read about the Wonderbra, that marvel of Lycra and lace that adds a full cup size to a woman’s—how can I say this delicately?—hooters.
Having been cursed with undersized ’uns for years myself, the news of a Wonderbra was wonderful indeed.
Until recently, the Wonderbra, which uses wads of lace, padding, and wire to—as they used to say on Rawhide—head ’em up and move ’em out, was mostly available in Great Britain. (This is also home of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie empire, giving rise to the notion that Brits take their breasts very seriously. They like their cleavage even better than half-witted royals and warm beer.)
Speaking as one who could truly benefit from the Wonderbra, and its less well-known knocker-offs, I wondered if this was for real or, as Newsweek put it, “a tempest in a D-cup.”
As a trained investigative journalist, it seemed to me this would be a great opportunity to charge a few of these bras to the company in the name of research. Padding my breasts would be much more fun than padding my mileage. After all, the latter doesn’t get you great service at hotel bars or finer gas stations everywhere.
As it turned out, I had to pay for my own bra research, but that was okay because I’d get to present my Bra and Panty Club membership card and earn a couple of stamps toward that elusive free bra. (The way these “clubs” work is that after you’ve bought fifty or so bras, you get one free. Unfortunately, by that time, you’re so old and senile, you’re in the nursing home calling all the orderlies “Mr. Truman” and your ta-ta’s are down around your knees somewhere.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. My sister, who is not a trained investigative journalist but rather works for the guv’mint (read: always free to go shopping on weekdays), agreed to go along as a sort of witness.
We both suspected this was just one more ruse on gullible women consumers, kind of like mascara that promises not to smudge, then leaves you at day’s end with raccoon eyes so bad your coworkers nickname you “Bandit.”
While my sister waited outside the dressing room, I fumbled with all the straps, padding, wires, and hooks in the amazing Lilyette, an Americanized Wonderbra that costs about $25. All the while, I shouted through the door to her, “You’re about to see why I chose to go into this profession. To sniff out corruption, to expose consumer fraud wherever I…OHMIGOD!!!!!”
I flung open the door and my new, improved breasts hit my sister smack in the face. They were EVERYWHERE, like lacy guided missiles ready to poke out the eyes of unfortunate third-graders.
This was unbelievable. My sister stood up, slowly, and rubbed her jaw where a light bruise was beginning to form. It’s crazy, but there’s something empowering about suddenly having large breasts, even if they’re not really your own. I didn’t want to give up this feeling even for a minute, so like a little kid who’s gone shoe-shopping, I asked the clerk at the cash register if I could “wear ’em out of the store.”
She said I could wear ’em on top of my head if I liked, as long as they were paid for.
“Well, that would look pretty silly, now wouldn’t it?” I snapped. “What do you take me for, some kind of an idiot?”
“Celia, for God’s sake, put your shirt back on,” my sister hissed from behind.
Right.
That night, I decided the four of us would go out for a “test drive”—me, my husband, and my two new faithful companions.
We all went out to dinner and my husband asked me to move over a little because my store-boughts were blocking the TV in the bar.
With pleasure, I said, coyly resting them on the tabletop, obliterating at least ten of the twelve symbols for the Chinese zodiac.
Someone shoulda told me how much fun this was going to be.
When Did Redbook Get Trashy?
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I do know that I’m grateful that my grandmother isn’t alive to see it. I’m talking, of course, about Redbook going slutty. To be fair, it’s not just Redbook that seems to have become less Kathie Lee and more Courtney Love. Plenty of traditional “women’s magazines,” the ones that used to be neatly fanned on your mama’s coffee table, have gotten downright “naisty.”
Even the venerable Ladies’ Home Journal has taken to writing about things like orgasms in the space where they used to feature “Ten Exciting New Chicken Dishes to Please Him Tonight!” or “Mushroom Soup Miracles!”
My late Aunt Sudavee would’ve fainted dead away if the postman had delivered her beloved Redbook with a headline like the one on a recent cover: “HAVE SEX LIKE YOU’RE SINGLE!” (On second thought, Aunt Sudavee might have just assumed that having sex like you’re single meant you simply didn’t have it at all, so what’s the big deal?)
Another issu
e screams that they’ve found out what makes hubby HOT! I already know the answer to that one: a botched call on a line drive. Duh.
The other magazine I remember being around in my childhood was Progressive Farmer. I’m not sure if they even publish it anymore, but chances are if they do, it’s got plenty of articles like “Billy Bob Has Two Daddies.”
When I was young and single, I indulged in the occasional guilty pleasure that was Cosmopolitan. Today, except for a few extra meatloaf recipes and some obligatory articles about saying good-bye forever to closet clutter, you can’t tell the difference between a Cosmo gal and a Good Housekeeping broad. (The cover photos are still vastly different, it should be noted. Cosmo continues to favor those envy-inducing Amazons With Cleavage while the rest prefer an eighteen-layer coconut cake. Personally, I think the cake is a lot sexier.)
Of course, it’s not that these articles aren’t useful and interesting. How did my grandmother’s generation scrape by without “19 Steamy Moves That Will Make Him Beg for You Again!”
I have noticed that, when visiting elderly relatives, I no longer see Redbook lying around, so I suppose the word is out.
In its place are strange, skinny little magazines like Modern Mature Living, or some such, that are long on insurance articles (“What to Do When Your Husband Wants to Buy That Cheap-Ass Ed McMahon Insurance Instead of the Good Stuff”) and noticeably short on orgasms. Oh, and the quaint toilet-top staple, Reader’s Digest, which hasn’t changed since, hmmmm, Reconstruction.
On a recent visit to my husband’s aunt’s home, I noticed a Redbook peeking out from behind her flour canister.
“What’s THIS?” I demanded, while trying to sneak a look at “Yes, You CAN Dress Like a Catholic Schoolgirl!”
“Oh, that,” she stammered. “Somebody must’ve left it there. You know I had bridge club the other day and there were a lot of people in and out.”
Bless Your Heart, Tramp Page 4