by Cathy Alter
So I had come to the fancy bookstore in Georgetown, to select the governing body of magazines that would define, shape, and rule the next year of my life. In a real sense, I was standing in front of that wall because I had hit a metaphoric one.
I voted out some magazines immediately. Essence and Working Mother didn’t exactly speak to me and my status as a single honky. And as I flipped through Redbook, I imagined their reader dressed in Eddie Bauer no-press chinos and being outstandingly skilled at scrapbooking. Then there were the ones that didn’t offer enough how-to ethos. This translated to having the word you on the cover, as in “Exotic and Erotic Sex Tricks for You,” a cover line from June’s Marie Claire. So even though I idolized Jane Pratt for Sassy (and I’m talking about the early, unadulterated years), her Jane had always struck me as identityless (yet somehow self-congratulatory about it), and was conspicuously devoid of the kind of dictates I was after. Vogue was also devoid of bulleted lists, makeup lessons, and perf-out advice. If ever an editor anthropomorphized into a magazine, it would be Anna Wintour. She was better than me, and I knew it.
Eventually, I started playing a game of “What famous magazine would I invite to a dinner party?” This set the table pretty quickly. Ladies’ Home Journal, you’re a bit of a fuddy-duddy. Come sit next to me, Cosmo!
In the end I went with a core sisterhood of nine women’s magazines: Elle for its European high fashion and Marie Claire for how to get that same je ne sais quoi for less money; O, The Oprah Magazine, for her pretty on the inside and Allure for its paint job on the out; Self to tighten my ass and Cosmopolitan to help me use it. For sheer chutzpah, I picked Glamour, for doling out their wisdom with manicured nails and an iron fist. Because I sincerely wanted to know where all of Hollywood bought their jeans, I allowed myself the guilty pleasure of InStyle. And for shelter, I chose Real Simple (as someone who has never turned on her oven and used only one burner at a time, I was not about to tangle with Martha Stewart).
These magazines, I thought as I fanned them out on the checkout counter, were my Rosetta stone. The ads for watches and face creams, the splay-legged models, the exclusive new surveys—if I deciphered their codes, I’d understand all that had been previously unknowable. My wishes, losses, hopes, and shame.
The cashier was clearly not thinking any of this. “Are you opening a nail salon?” she inquired, bagging what she perceived to be reading material for women waiting for their polish to dry.
Anything can change a life that’s ready to be changed.
I can’t remember if I heard this on Dr. Phil, if I read it on a coffee mug, or if I happened to make it up myself. Whatever the source, it was an aphorism that I thought important enough to print out and tape to my computer monitor. It had been staring me in the face for over a year now.
I believed in getting a better life. I was totally convinced that in following the advice found in these magazines, I would be able to show that life—my life—was a work in progress. It was okay that I wasn’t there yet. The journey was all in the souvenirs picked up along the way. Maybe tighter triceps, an entrance-making dress, and the map to his secret pleasure zones were the meretricious emblems of true happiness.
What follows is a social experiment on myself, a real-life application of women’s magazines—in all its triumph, ass-kicking, and unfortunate choices in lipstick.
JUNE
Do or Diet
taking baby steps into a new life seemed like the most humane way to slap myself in the face. I was not mentally prepared to take on a month of money matters or transform anything with paint. My inaugural challenge should be familiar and manageable. Because personal experience showed that I had more control over what (and not who) I put in my mouth, my first foray into self-improvement was to be food-related.
At five-eleven and a size 6, diet is a noun for me, not a verb. I didn’t need to lose weight. I just needed to stop eating the insides of the vending machine for lunch. Plus, an official lunch would provide balance and structure to my routine, elements of a normal life that had been AWOL from mine.
If I didn’t have a digestive system more fragile than most tropical fish, I would eat anything put in front of me. Here’s a partial list of foods most deadly to me: shrimp, lobster, ice cream, tuna fish, yogurt, cheese, pumpkin seeds, black beans, white wine, Brazil nuts, soybeans, calcium-enriched orange juice, tiramisu, lamb, and anything from Fuddruckers. I also stopped eating red meat when I was poor and living on my own in New York City. Now that I’m more gainfully employed, I’d like to begin incorporating a bit of beef into my diet, but I’m convinced that first hamburger will send my body into seismic shock.
Because I suffered from so many food allergies, I defaulted to bread. And more bread. I kicked off my days with a jumbo cinnamon raisin bagel and often repeated the same breakfast for lunch when I couldn’t think of anything else to eat. And if I wasn’t eating popcorn for dinner, I was slapping together a peanut butter (protein!) and jelly sandwich or eating a Dunkin’ Donuts corn muffin directly out of the bag.
I thought hard about bread and how much I was going to miss a nice crust. I didn’t need to open up a single June issue to know that the only acceptable baguettes I’d find would come from Fendi, not France. What I didn’t know was what directives were going to come down from the mountain of magazines that were currently piled on my coffee table—and whether their instructions would result in anything suitable for eating. I imagined a month of shelling snow peas and discovering 10 Tricks for Tastier Tofu. I pictured myself the way I envisioned other healthy eaters—clear-eyed and vibrating with sunshine—and realized I was smiling.
Food has always been a vehicle of change for me, and June was always when the drive began. The moment school let out for summer, I was preparing for fall, when I’d reenter school a different person. Tanner, prettier, shorter (I was heads taller than most of the boys in my class), more confident, magically popular, and finally, FINALLY, kissed. Naturally, I thought the last three would happen only if the first three did.
My first attempt at self-improvement took place the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when my mother and I went on the Scarsdale diet. The food, or lack thereof, was practically prison fare: a scoop of cottage cheese, a piece of skinless chicken, cantaloupes ad nauseam. Breakfast, which consisted of a single slice of dry protein toast the size and consistency of a cocktail napkin washed down with a hellish glass of grapefruit juice, was a key hardship.
Sensing the historic significance of a first diet, I documented my regimen with tedious precision; my quilted Holly Hobbie diary soon took on the qualities of an actuarial spreadsheet. When I wasn’t suffering through a dressing-free salad or immortalizing it with Dickensonian aplomb, I was breaststroking like crazy in our swimming pool.
I lasted a week, at which point Gail, my best friend since fifth grade, took me to the snack bar at her country club. I became a spectacle of nutritional noncompliance. I happily purchased a bag of Doritos and a cup of hot fudge (for dipping purposes), and we watched a gang of deeply tanned women play mah-jongg with the same gaping interest we normally reserved for the Matt Dillon classic Over the Edge. I had never seen mah-jongg before and assumed that the women, with their coral lips, python-print caftans, and numinous ivory tiles, were gypsies, despite the fact that we were deep in the suburbs of Farmington, Connecticut, at a private club that admitted only Jews.
Not that I should have been on a diet in the first place. I wasn’t fat, in spite of my father pinching my “love handles” and nicknaming me Butterball. “Are your thighs still hungry?” he’d ask, whenever I reached for seconds or asked if I could order dessert.
Photos of me at this time show an immature face with full, smooth cheeks, my hipless torso and ribbon legs predicting the shape I would eventually own in adulthood. Yet, at twelve, I had neither the therapy nor the vocabulary to tell my father that he may have been projecting—or getting even with me for every time I poked him in the stomach and asked him to laugh like the
Pillsbury Doughboy.
My mother, a six-foot-tall glamazon with a closet pulled from her own clothing boutique, sent the most powerful message to me by way of her dinner plate. I took a nightly inventory of what she ate. “Why don’t you want a baked potato?” I’d wonder. “Don’t you like the Colonel’s special biscuits?”
“I’m on a diet,” she’d respond, without fail. To ensure she stuck to it, she’d only stock our cookie jar with Mallomars and our freezer with rainbow sherbet—textures and flavors she found repellent and unworthy.
I grew up accepting the inevitability that once you became a woman, you were always on a diet. Being a woman equaled loss.
As I reached for a bright orange Cosmopolitan with an equally orange (-haired, -skinned, -dressed) Jessica Simpson on the cover, I wondered what was I about to give up—and what I would eventually gain. Flashy and obvious, with page after page of bite-size true confessions about sex in predominantly public places, Cosmo was like diving into a big bag of penny candy. Before I knew it, I was in some sugar-induced euphoria, taking the Cosmo Quiz “Do You Make Men M-E-L-T?”
1. You’re checking into a resort with friends when you notice a group of hot guys. You:
a. Pray your pals don’t embarrass you
b. Say, “Hey boys, we’re in room 508!”
c. Smile. If they start a convo, you’ll say “Maybe we’ll see you by the pool.”
Can you believe that I really took the time to consider these lettered possibilities? Neither could I. But I chose C, the milquetoast of the trio, and moved on.
2. The guy you’re casually dating excitedly asks if you’ve ever kissed a girl. You say:
a. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
b. “Gross, never!”
c. “Sure! Wanna see me do it now?”
HILARIOUS! Had this quiz been written in irony? This was funny by design, right? I liked that I was in on the joke and circled A, because seriously, guys love when you toy with your sexuality.
3. You’re chilling at the park next to a stud. What do you do to get his attention?
a. Some provocative yoga poses
b. Sunbathe in your bra
c. Pull out your romance novel
I knew a coked-out hairdresser in my neighborhood who would have selected A without a moment’s hesitation. I once saw her pull her leg around her head at a dinner party, her crotch aimed directly toward the one straight man in the room.
It didn’t take me long to determine the obvious. Cosmo had divided the female quiz-taking population into three groups: Sluts, prudes, and everyone else. Did this prevent me from immensely enjoying the discovery of the apparent? Did this stop me from inserting myself into the rest of the seven scenarios? No, it did not. After I decided the television character I most related to was Elliot from Scrubs and that I’d most likely wear cropped pants and a T-shirt to an outdoor party, I tallied my score and learned that I was a simmering seductress. I “project come-hither vibes that don’t scream desperate.”
Rather than being dismayed that I had turned to Cosmo to tell me who I really was, I felt oddly validated (as well as highly entertained) and congratulated myself for coming up with this genius idea. In the past, I had to speed-read my way through the latest installments of Glamour or InStyle in the poorly lit waiting room of my dentist’s office. Now, I had an actual excuse, a job, a responsibility to read all these magazines every single month for the next year. I could hardly wait for my subscriptions to kick in.
Even though I was supposed to be limiting myself to healthy-eating articles, it was hard not to devour every magazine cover to cover, which took me approximately five hours (not counting the hour I spent online trying to locate the necklace Katie Holmes wore throughout her “Single in the City” photo spread in InStyle magazine).
Spending an afternoon with the ladies, I realized how much voyeuristic, diversionary amusement was available to me, like the article in Marie Claire about a woman who recruits a wingman to help her land a date. It was a different kind of pleasure, this sort of reading, compared to tackling a ten thousand-word profile on Gertrude Stein in the New Yorker, for example. I forgot how much dumb fun regular reading could be. I was both thrilled and horrified by the thought of filling my head with the latest developments in teeth whiteners and wondered what kind of parlor tricks I’d be performing for friends: Look, everyone! Watch how Lucy’s jawline softens when I give her a deep side part!
Even if an article was wildly out of sync with my June mission, I tore out whatever I saw as having value for future months. O, The Oprah Magazine, for instance, had devoted the month to “religion,” with her Ah, Men! special issue. Inside, there were all sorts of articles with captions like “How to Get Through to a Man,” “Bald Is to Male as Fat Is to Female,” and the highly educational, “Getting Him to Open Up, or How to Interview a Brick Wall,” by Seth Kugel, a New York Times reporter who wrote that getting a man to talk is comparable to cracking a tough subject, like asking Dick Cheney “where the undisclosed location is.” And even though David L. Katz’s The Way to Eat column was male-oriented, I ripped it out. I figured I could still put it to use the next time I was entertaining my own lab rat, since Katz offered guidance on the healthiest alcohol to serve to a guy who still wanted to pound a few cocktails.
While I built the ultimate reference library, I continued to look for anything food-related. It was pretty slim pickings. Perhaps all the healthy-eating articles appeared in April, with umpteen variations on the “Get Bikini-Ready by Memorial Day” theme plastered across covers. I mostly found articles that offered advice and encouragement for sticking to a diet, not for beginning one. Allure had an ongoing monthly feature called Total Makeover, where a weight-loss specialist had been downsizing three pear-shaped women since January. Next to a full-body shot of each participant (who all got the memo from Marcel Marceau to wear black mime tights on their lower halves) was a chart comparing their current weight, waist, hip, and body fat measurements to their January stats. One of the women, a pretty pale blonde with muscular calves, revealed that she sticks to her diet by rewarding herself with a manicure. Below her profile was a photograph of a cassette tape with words of encouragement recorded by the specialist, who had labeled the tape, “Nothing tastes as great as thin.” A little cannibalistic, but the sentiment was well placed. I tore out the page and decided to apply the reward strategy to my own battle with junk food. A manicure would look much better without a fringe of orange Cheetos powder under my fingernails.
Cosmo had a twist on caloric slip-ups, with an “Informer” piece on celebrity binges. I was surprised to learn that Eva Mendes sought solace in tuna sandwiches with “extra onions and Doritos smashed inside.” There was even a photo of Eva sitting in a café, shoving something that resembled a Gorton’s breaded fish fillet in her mouth. No wonder she was wearing dark sunglasses.
I put off reading Real Simple until the end—mostly because I was tempted by the sheer razzle-dazzle of the other magazines. But it was here, among ample white space, unfussy graphics, and a calm, reassuring tone, that I found my centerpiece for June: four beautifully art-directed pages devoted to covering things in plastic wrap. (This was not to be confused with Cosmo’s more faithful interpretation of package wrap. Number 8 in their “Sex Trick Hall of Fame” called for covering a man’s testicles with a square of plastic wrap, pressing your lips against the parcel, and humming gently. I made a mental note to file this one away for sex month.)
Besides giving step-by-step pictorials for swathing half an onion and a hearty slice of what looked like frosted lemon cake in plastic, Real Simple had grandly spotlighted a tutorial in sandwich wrapping.
The potential for my personal success was multifold. For one, I would be brown-bagging my lunch, a phenomenon that hadn’t occurred since junior high school. Not only was I taking preventive measures against a meal of pretzels and animal crackers, I would be giving my quarters a higher purpose—the washing machine in my building.
I h
ave a thing about cling wrap, aka the kitchen equivalent of a wire hanger. Both menaces share the exact same characteristic—the ability to completely fuck with you. Cling Wrap, wily, born of static, and with a gravitational pull toward its home planet, simply demanded too much work. Maybe I have poor motor control, but I just can’t deal with this runaway-train aspect. Aluminum foil is malleable, predictable, and to my aesthetics, so much prettier.
But this project was all about self-improvement. Perhaps learning how to encase a sandwich in plastic would also serve as a meditation on tolerance and acceptance.
Because my kitchen is the approximate size of a welcome mat, with a toaster, microwave, and coffeemaker vying for space on the only counter, I rarely made anything that required a surface area larger than a dinner plate. A sandwich, however, fell within the zoning limit, so I was not feeling any performance anxiety as I set out to prepare my lunch. At 8:30 AM, a good twenty minutes before I left for the ten-minute walk to work, I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and set about wrapping it.
Real Simple testers selected Glad’s Press’n Seal as the best all-around stick-to-iter (can you imagine what circle of hell the job of analyzing plastic wrap occupies?), but my local supermarket is too low-rent to carry such an advanced piece of technology. I had to slum it with an earlier generation, the classic Cling Wrap.
When I studied the three photos demonstrating the proper wrapping procedure, the first thing that came to mind was jazz hands. Because the only things moving from photo to photo were the hands, which were expressive and dramatic looking. The sandwich maintained the same canted position from one photo to the next. I recalled that scene in The Bird Cage where Robin Williams analogously choreographs his backup dancers. “Now Fosse, Bob Fosse. Martha Graham, Martha Graham!”