Right now I’m working on a big project and should
not be frittering away my time on humor pieces! I’m on strike or leave from the Sentinel, or kaput, depending on how things
turn out, and don’t want to print anything there. But meanwhile I saw one of those weight-loss ads featuring a
woman holding up Moby Pants and it struck me as funny and I couldn’t help
myself. So here for what it’s worth is
my take on Before Pants, published NOWHERE ELSE BUT HERE!
Dear
Skinny Britches Basher: Kiss My
Homonym!
By
Robin Ford Wallace
January is the
time of year for Before Pants pictures.
You know the
ones. Sometimes they’re on the cover of
women’s magazines, inviting you to try some new diet, sometimes on
advertisements for gyms or weight loss programs.
But the image is
always the same: a slender young woman
holding up a monstrous pair of pants.
She was not always the smiling sylph we see now, explains the copy
below. There was a time she changed
weather patterns by blotting out the sun wherever she traveled (shaking the
earth as she went).
Then she went on
the featured diet, tackled the featured exercise program or underwent the
featured surgery. Whatever it was, it
worked, and now she stands there in her itty size ones offering up these
grotesque discarded elephant skins for our entertainment.
What a vicious
betrayal of pants!
Hi there. I’m Robin, all-American Fat Girl, Weight
Watchers recidivist, yo-yo dieter extraordinaire; a size 8 when I bought my
wedding dress, roughly a 12 by the reception, when the front seam gave way
during a belly laugh after a couple of prenuptial weeks of beer and pizza. I haven’t seen the inside of an 8 – hell, a
14 – since, but I do keep trying, and this is the time of year I try the
hardest.
January around
here is a time of fasting and purification, the Holy Month of Robindon we call
it, when your narrator declares sacred fat-wah against the pounds accumulated
the rest of the year, which are legion.
It’s not religious; it’s a matter of either receding into one’s natural
boundaries or moving into orbit around the sun.
So this is the
season my eyes gravitate helplessly to the current Before Pants picture and
land there with a noise, and more often than not I bite the bait. I have gone on the Atkins, Scarsdale and
South Beach diets. I have bought
Skechers, green coffee bean extract and a treadmill. I am, in fact, the Before Pants’s target audience.
But as I looked at
this year’s Ms. Skinny emerging from her baggy denim cocoon, I remembered the
motto from a funky VW repair manual I bought in the 1970s: “Be kind to thy Ass for it bears thee.” And I thought, shouldn’t we also be kind to
our pants, for they cover our –
Well, the motto
refers to the beast of burden, not to its anatomical homonym; but when a person
humiliates her pants what she is really insulting is the homonym zipped
therein. And that’s my real problem
with Before Pants: I’m all about a new
beautiful me but I don’t want anybody flagellating my old fat –
– blue jeans. Before Pants are almost always jeans – jeans
the size of subway tunnels, maybe, but still jeans – and after a lifetime of
fat-wah I can tell you that in the eternal struggle against planethood a girl
never had a truer friend than her jeans.
Wear elastic
waistbands if you want to eat your way into the solar system, but if you prefer
to remain within your ZIP code choose jeans because they will alert you the
minute you exceed your mashed potato quota.
My Levis may get a size larger every year as age and gravity gain
ground, but as long as I have one pair I can zip up by hook or by crook I am by
God still in the fight.
“If they zip they
fit” is the Fat Girl Creed, and how many of my blue denim allies have died
valiantly in battle to uphold it? (To
say nothing of the wedding dress.) I
remember losing one pair as I stretched up to dust a ceiling fan and came
exploding from the seams like Lake Pontchartrain breaching its levees. Bless those jeans’ heart, they had seen me
through, but did not survive, quitting smoking.
And jeans are not just the means of waging fat-wah;
they are also the prize. The short-term
goal is always to squeeze back into the next size down but the ultimate reward,
the whole point, is to strut victorious from the battlefield wearing the Skinny
Jeans that make a girl feel all hot and dangerous. In the words of the great Conway Twitty, “Partner, there’s a
tiger in these tight-fittin’ jeans.”
Back to that Ass saying: I thought it was from the Bible, but
Googling it all I found was Aesop’s fables.
The Ass figures in a lot of those.
He does stupid things, everybody beats crap out of him, and the moral
boils down to: “Don’t be an Ass.” He’s always, ahem, the butt of the joke, but
I identified with the poor beast every time.
The worst is the
fable where the Ass, jealous of the Lapdog, breaks into the house and cavorts
there playfully, imitating the dog but at his size destroying the furniture,
then tries to climb into the master’s lap.
I keep seeing my poor old homonym in the same situation, wiggling
coquettishly in its tight Levis while everyone stares at it in horror and
finally drives it away with sticks.
This January, I’m wearing jeans with Before
written all over them. You look at them
and think, “They make ‘em that size?”
They’d been in the drawer since some past Robindon pared me down to the
next weight class, and I hadn’t swelled back to quite that magnitude until
2013.
I’m hoping
Robindon 2014 will send these big boys back to pasture and I’ll never have to
trot them out again. But if I do need
them next winter, and in between I have posed for a photo smugly holding their
billowing yardage up for derision, I hope they will tell me to kiss their
–
END
