My brother, Steve, was a really fat baby. He looked like the love child of Winston Churchill and Sophie Tucker. Maybe it was the cake. He did love his angel food with chocolate icing.
Genes are mysterious things because, somewhere around age four or five, Steve got skinny and stayed that way. On the other hand, I was a skinny child until around age nine. After noticing that my cousin, Jim, got constant praise from adults for cleaning his plate I decided to do the same. Soon I found that food was actually GOOD and began packing it away like I was going to "the chair." Basking in the compliments I received from the BIG people earned me proud membership in the Big Eaters Club, and all was right with the world for a while.
My training regime from age nine to fourteen was comprised of eating, goofing off, and reading comic books. Soon I was, as mom would put it, "big-boned." (Shouldn't that be "big intestined?") My old man didn't believe in euphemisms. He called me FAT. " Just look at that gut on you!" "How old are you fatso? You look fifty!" were often offered as observations. I just blew it off and went for another sandwich. Sorry, Dad.
Then, the event that turned me around happened at school on picture day in the Autumn of my eighth-grade year. Picture day, that annual ritual where a local photographer, who submitted the lowest bid to your school, comes to your lock-up to snap some really horrible shots of your visage to sell to your mom. You know, the ones where your hair is all messed up, your face is riven with acne, and, oh yeah, YOU BLINKED. THAT picture day.
At our school, the local picture yokel would try to make you smile by teasing you with a nickname or two. It usually didn't work, but it was his "act." When my turn before the camera came he got me to smile by referring to me as "Mr. Summer Sausage", which I found amusing. (I don't know, it just sounded funny.) It wasn't until I had returned to class that I realized the dude had basically called me FAT. That son of a bitch!
I worried about being "Mr. Summer Sausage" for days. At first, I sought solace in food but soon came to think that maybe playing a little more ball and eating a lot less food might do wonders for my corpulent physique. It did. A year later I was looking better, you know, NORMAL. Best of all, the girls in my class were now speaking to me. AMAZING! I've kept the weight off ever since.
Last Monday I picked up the paper to discover that I have wasted my life in denial. San Diego State University, SDSU, now offers a major in FAT STUDIES. According to the university, fat studies is an emerging academic field that explores the social and political consequences of being overweight. The fact that 67 percent of American adults are overweight or obese has prompted the university to take up their cause. Here is an excerpt from "The Fat Studies Reader": "Overweight is inherently anti-fat. It implies an extreme goal: Instead of a bell curve distribution of human weights, it calls for a lone, towering, unlikely bar graph with everyone occupying the same (thin) weights." Huh????
San Diego State professor Esther Rothblum, a major porker, who is considered a leading scholar in blubber studies says "It's a field that believes all people should be treated with respect, regardless of body size." Does this remind anybody else of the old "My mother, drunk or sober" argument we heard so often during the war in Vietnam? The good professor notes that she may be considered fat but that she is healthy. She went on to say that she has been playing racquetball for 30 years and recently placed third in her division at the Gay Games. She is 5 feet 4 and weighs 230 pounds. I'll leave to you the speculation as to where she may have finished if she had trimmed down to a mere 180 pounds. Now that I think about it, WHO CARES?? I'M GOING BACK TO COLLEGE!!
It's the new FAT STUDIES major for me. Pass the pie and the Ph.D.! Mr. Summer Sausage is HUNGRY!
(This post was originally offered on September 18, 2009. Mr, Summer Sausage wonders if San Diego State is still offering a Fat Studies major? How many circus fat ladies can any country need?)
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