Figures

The trouble with my figure is that it’s always been years ahead of its time. For instance, when I was sixteen, I weighed less than a hundred pounds, but did fashion photographers clamor for my services as a model? Of course not. The only one who took any notice of my figure was the school nurse, who told my mother to give me a dose of neo-chemical food three times a day before meals to perk up my appetite.

And now that I’ve gained forty pounds and am convex in more places than are absolutely necessary, what kind of figure is the ideal? You guessed it. Today every female over twelve wants to look like Camille after a long languishing winter in a sanitarium.

Not only was I born at the wrong time, but on the wrong continent! In North America, the female ideal looks like a starving twelve-year-old boy. In the Middle East, fat women are admired so much, their husbands keep them idle, free from stress and stuffed with delicacies, like Christmas geese.

The trouble with having a skinny body is that it’s not much good for breeding anything but germs. Therefore, even though you have to look like a toothpick to catch a husband, if you don’t put on at least twenty pounds immediately after the ceremony, you’ll never have enough strength to cope with that big house and all those kids that marriage inevitably entails.

After all, could Kate Moss clean out the basement, wash the car and bake two apple pies in the morning and still have enough strength left over to play right wing on her son’s hockey team after school? Don’t be ridiculous! Only opera stars and mothers carry the necessary ballast to enable them to hit that high C or work like a deck hand twenty-two hours a day.

The ultimate goal of every woman is to have the silhouette of a string bean. However, she knows full well that if she does gain weight, it must be concentrated entirely in front, between her neck and her waist. Unfortunately, most women find that with every additional birthday and baby, extra pounds start slipping downward, settling around hips and thighs like barnacles on a boat.

Life is so unfair! The next time around, I intend to be born in the sixteenth century, when men liked their women to look as though they had something to rest on besides their laurels.