"Man Goes On Meat Rampage To Save 'Chubby Girls'"

Reposted from The Consumerist:
"The AP says that an Indiana man went on a bizarre rampage in a supermarket, pulling out a hunting knife and attacking packages of hamburger. He then threw dog food onto it...."

Watch the news video on the link if you dare! ("Uh...she was preparing a pot roast or something...") This story is funny, but it's also really scary.

ticker shock

In case you haven't seen it, here is the story about the University of Rochester study that discovered non-obese patients had a 76 percent greater risk of sudden cardiac risk than obese patients. ("When overweight patients were factored out, the researchers were startled to find that underweight and normal-weight patients ran a 99 percent higher risk of sudden cardiac failure than obese patients.")

The line from the author of the survey - "He theorizes that because their bodies are already surviving bad treatment, they are more resistant to heart failure" - brings up something I find interesting, which is that people always seem to assume fat people's hearts are in bad shape because of all the checks they see in the con column without taking into account factors in the pro column as well. Every time a fat person climbs the stairs they are working much harder than the skinny person next to them. Which is good and bad or whatever it is, but it is ultimately a fact. That heart is working hard. Why isn't that ever in the equation?

oh pliz

No way is this story real. It started out all over British papers, not US ones, although it looks like the incident might have occurred in Florida...although you can't tell for sure where the story happened, that's how journalistic it is. I can't find any original reporting, just editorialized wire repeats.

And--it reads like a Fat Moral Tale told by MeMe Roth. The wages of sloth are fat! He built his own prison!

hard copies!

I will figure out a way to write in this blog more. There are barriers! More than the usual attached to procrastination and such.

I am realizing how much of the public discussion of size out there I have absolutely no desire to engage in. At all. What a very helpful skill for keeping a size acceptance blog! First and foremost because I think the way we are feel that what we or anybody else eats is perfectly appropriate fuel for every kind of revelatory, punitive, boundary-less public discussion is off-base.

So I gotta figure that out. Haven't figured that out.

In the meantime: what should I do with all my old copies of Radiance magazine? Getting Radiance in the mail was a really important, really big part of my life and development as a fat chick. Very different than reading things online.

I held it in my paws, and turned things over and over, and absorbed them much better than I do know. So...I don't know. I have many of them and haven't looked at them for years. I don't like them taking up room, but I'm still loathe to let them go. Hmm. We'll see.

yah yah roly!

terrible video quality, but I sure love this song

Lives are at stake!

I was so thoroughly offended by the ads for Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, wherein he brings enlightenment to the shores of fat stupid America with his cocky brand of charm, that I had to get up and walk it off. The promos even threw a few Headless Fatties™ shots in there to make their editorial position clear. The combination of Extreme Home Makeover style TV with childhoodobesity sanctimoniousness...I wanted to choke a bitch. I'd link directly to the promo (it's the 30-second one), but the ABC site is fascist. Makes you watch lots of vids to get to a particular one. LIVES ARE AT STAKE! Jamie says.

Gah. Fuck. The weird compensated public torch-passing (kirstiealley 2 valeriebertinelli 2 jasonalexander) is very hard to watch!

whatcha find?

If it didn't mean that people never took me seriously again too late! I think I would start a blog called What Did You Find in Your Bra at the End of the Day? Or maybe Pennies From Heaven. Women could write in after totting up what they find in there: change, food, phones, hankies, whatever. Companies could match the monies found there dollar-for-dollar and donate to favorite charities. It would be an exercise in archeology for generations to come.

oh Kirstie

I haven't watched Kirstie Alley's new show. I don't want to. I didn't want to watch her on Oprah thin, I didn't want to watch her weight-loss commercials (those were harder to avoid), I didn't want to watch Fat Actress. I don't want to watch any of it.

I feel I should know more about her Fatty Oeuvre, as someone interested in issues of size, but I am really uninterested when I'm not actively repelled, to be honest. I don't like feeling complicit in people's emotional battles about eating or about their size. Oprah has a bad habit of encouraging this kind of sticky, mess stuff: with herself, with Wynonna Judd's public self-flagellating.

Not to mention there is a crass, mercenary side to what Alley's doing that turns me off from the start. I can see where it comes from, in a way: why not focus on this stuff, as an actress who's aging, whose looks are something of public property.

But it's all so dead-end. And non-resolvable. And nobody's fucking business. There's no grand redemption--and we should know that. You go up, you go down. You've "solved" your fatness--whoops, now you haven't. It's a marketing dream, in a way--the constant drama. As long as you are in agonies about it, it's okay to be fat. Okay & good business.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton died. This poem made a huge impression on me in my twenties as I found my way through things, as I'm sure it did for many people. Opened my mind (that is the right phrase here). And that top thing is for real.

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don't fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

no way

One of the shittier names I've seen for a diet product (it's showing up on late-night informercial rotation here). Reminds me a little of the days of the AYDS chewable diet candies.

bad boy!

Really, really, really stupid column in Chicago Sun-Times by Laura Washington about Kevin Smith situation (thanks, Martha-baby, for the link).

"He needs to lay off the tweeting and put that energy into reducing his girth. There's nothing funny about America's obesity epidemic." Now you go upstairs and you think about what you've done!

One peril of our country's unwillingness to intelligently address issues of size is, well, unintelligence. In print. Over and over. Among the other problems with this dumb-ass column is that the writing is terribly superficial.

yoiks

From E!Online, about Kelly Osbourne's interview in US:

"...this is what Miss Kelly O. has to say about battling her weight vs. the painkiller addiction that sent her to rehab a few times: I took more hell for being fat than I did for being an absolute raging drug addict."

I'm struck by:
1) E! creating the parallel between "weight" and "painkiller addiction" as beasts to be slayed. (It never sounds right to me to say "battling her weight"--if one's weight were "beaten," we wouldn't exist.)
2) What she said.
3) The curse of having a face that doesn't pass as thin. I'm not sure that she was ever fat, exactly, but she's certainly thin enough now to 'prove' to people that her face is naturally bigger. Keep them off her back. That kind of thin.

on the Kevin Smith situation

About two months ago I posted a blog entry here about my experiences with Southwest Airlines. I boycotted Southwest for years after it became the first airline to actually enforce the written all-airlines' policy of making customers of size buy an extra seat, but I've come to appreciate SW and the no-fuss way I can handle travel with them as a person who buys two seats. (The point of that piece being that my experience with them exists in contrast to other airlines, which have less practice enforcing these rules.)

A person who buys two seats: this situation requires a fundamental compromise on the passenger's part. After one last humiliating experience on United, when a customer held up the plane to complain about me to a cadre of clucking gate agents, I decided to never put myself through that again, and I now buy two seats whenever I travel on a plane, which I do not think I should have to do. When you buy transportation, you are buying passage, not real estate for the duration, and the implications in the idea that we should pay based on space are alarming for everyone. But I have reached détente with the situation. Budgeting for the second seat (and hoping for a refund on its cost) is part of how I plan for travel.

Kevin Smith, however, exists in the extremely well-populated segment of the American traveling public who are big but not big enough to be forced to engage with the second-seat policy--usually. Smith obviously bumped into it this weekend.

You can hear his version of the events here on the relevant Smodcast ("Go Fuck Yourself, Southwest Airlines"), but the gist is: Smith switched to standby for an earlier flight than the one(s) he had purchased tickets for. In doing so, he let go of the additional SW tickets he had bought (he usually buys two or three), and had just one seat for himself. He sat down in a middle seat between two people and was just buckling his seat belt when he was asked to disembark by a flight attendant. (On his next flight he had two seats and the woman next to his empty seat was also large, and was taken aside to be told that she should have two seats and needed to ask Smith if it was okay if she sat there).

It's confusing that Smith was thrown off the plane at all: he could buckle the seat belt and put down the armrests completely, the latter of which keeps him out of SW's "definitive gauge" for being a "customer of size." That makes no sense. Something left him vulnerable to that decision by the flight attendants, who cited pro forma and vague safety concerns of "the pilot," standard issue stuff for SW's size policies. Why he was subject to them at all is not clear, except that maybe he just fit the profile (with fat, as ever, it is actually a greater sin to look fat than be fat).

Smith says once if he says it thirty times in his podcast that "he's fat but not that fat." "I'm not fat enough to have this conversation," he told a SW agent. "I'm not fat enough to eject off a fucking plane yet. I'll tell you when I am." He talks a lot about "the bar," the point at which you're so fat you can't fake it--can't squeeze into a seat. He says that if he were too big to fit in the seat, he "wouldn't come out in public."

He doesn't say this in a mean way. He's not making fun of anybody. He's eloquent about the way in which fat people have to think "ten steps in advance" about how we fit in to spaces.

And he's right, in the literal sense: he is fat-but-not-fat-enough to have run into this problem. The armrests could go down. He's one of the many many people who fly worrying about the two-seat policy and hoping they don't need it, or--much more likely--are ignorant or confused about it, but still worried about fitting, period. And to date Smith had been protected from the policy by virtue of money. He was able to routinely buy more seats because he could, not because he had to--he actually had the tool in hand (the discarded extra seats) that passengers need to avoid this situation.

But the line that he--that the airlines--draw. What if he couldn't put down the arm seats? What if he were "that fat"? What if he were technically a customer of size? What if he didn't have the money to do it? Should he have been tossed off the plane? Who does deserve that? When do airlines get to start charging more and pulling people aside? When is that okay? I think Smith's sense of chivalry was roused by seeing it happen to a woman after it happened to him, but that's how this works. What about fat children?

Maybe this isn't working. Maybe it's never okay and that's why this is such a mess. Maybe it's only a slippery slope with no solid ground. Maybe this is all about money. Smith's experience was able to light a match (most passengers don't have immediate access to a Twittering audience of millions) to show us how this is not working. The distinctions we draw are challenged and fall apart over and over. People get only bigger (and taller). Southwest has the most experience implementing policies about size, so what does that say, including about what's actually happening out there on other airlines? We're dividing people up based on a word we can't even say, to ourselves or others ("fat"). And fucking nobody's comfortable in a plane seat except maybe a six-year-old.

There are acres of things to address about this situation, but my feeling at the moment is that it's a good thing that it is getting the attention that it is, looming pitfalls in the arguments notwithstanding. I'm not sure the world cares much when this happens to a fat unfamous person, but it's a good thing when people have to resolve it with the power we accord fame. And Smith is speaking up.

I don't mind using the word fat, I don't mind knowing how much extra room I need, I don't mind asking for a seat belt extender. I don't like paying for a second airline seat, but I will do it--because I want to travel. I want to be out there. How many people, though, cram themselves in their seat, still as they can be and full of shame at every part of their body that bumps against the edges of the world around them? How many people don't even leave the house because of all this? How many people hide?

What if

"What if the phrase 'fat admirer' didn't have to exist as a separate part of desire because it was already a part of our collective unconscious of desirability?"

"letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model"

Not that surprising, but entertaining-awful nonetheless! Heh. Roam. January is a very interesting month in which to live in the Western world these days, I am convinced. The holiday blowback about food and bodies is so big and weird, and so thick with all sorts of reactiveness to perceived and real pressures...

huggin'

Yeah, baby (check out #3). Agreed, as both a giver and receiver.

two seats

I was at the NAAFA convention (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) in Atlanta in 2002, the year that Southwest Airlines began enforcing their policy of making large--I think specifically "obese"--passengers pay for an extra seat if deemed necessary by their staff. It was the first time an airline had done this, although (as I understand it) most airlines had/have such policies in place, just not overtly enforced at that point. The clueless way the Southwest rep handled the press conference, as well as my perception of the general attitude of the company, made me determined to never fly their airline again, and I didn't for almost five years.

Now, though, things have changed, the main point being that I have accepted the idea of paying for two seats. I'm not thrilled, but I am willing to do it, for the comfort and safety of me and others and for my peace of mind. The last time I flew with just one seat (it was on Ted/United) a man pitched a fit and held up the plane--take-off was delayed for 15 minutes--as five flight attendants and customer service reps clustered around him and he complained about sitting next to me. Never again, and I hope that meathead continues to dodge bad karma.

The funniest part is that Southwest has become my airline of choice and I am extremely loyal to them. It turns out that having taken the step early on, the airline is much better accustomed to dealing with passengers of size. They have practice at dealing with the situation, and do so in a quiet, efficient fashion. They don't pretend the situation doesn't exist, they just manage it--no big deal. Their flight attendants hand out seat extenders, no fuss, and you are given a ticket to put in the tray table latch of your second seat to eliminate confusion about the "empty" spot. The airline makes every effort to refund you the cost of the second ticket if there is any empty room or non-working airline staff on the plane, and do so quickly, usually in less than four days. I appreciate that particular gesture on their part enormously--it really changes the flavor of this transaction in which I cough up twice the normal fare.

Most importantly, you are allowed to pre-board, so that you can get your two seats together.

Together. You wouldn't think that'd be necessary, but some airlines make large passengers buy two seats these days, then fight them about the second seat. I'm not going to name names, since the experiences aren't my own, but I have heard more stories these days from people I know flying on other airlines who buy two tickets only to have to defend the second spot. Flight attendants--caught in a fight with gate staff, sometimes--try to give it away, ask to give it away, challenge the passenger, sometimes don't even let them board at a time when they can find two seats next to each other. I've even heard of people who bought seats giving up their extra seat with no compensation, at the urging of flight attendants.

This shit makes me insane with fury. Not to mention it's slightly insane, period (would you like your two seats together, or many rows apart, sir?). If you make passengers of size buy two tickets, you actually can not give away the second seat to somebody else, nor make it impossible to use. What is the point? These policies have to be clear right up front, and the customer shouldn't be caught in the mess as airline staff tries to be "tactful" and tramples all over customer rights in the meantime. Not to mention if the airlines are so concerned about other passengers' comfort, why aren't they ensuring the second seat is used as bought? Aren't they trying to obviate situations where people are squished together uncomfortably? More than usual, I mean.

There is a really nasty flavor to this kind of terrible customer service. Bullying and shaming and dishonest. Unfair. Grinding up people in corporate waffling. Decide what you are trying to do, airlines.

I feel have reached a state of pretty happy détente with Southwest. I make my good faith gesture of coughing up for an extra seat, they reciprocate by refunding me for the gamble if they can. It's not perfect--I had to concede something significant to do it, and, note, there are no frequent flyer miles attached to the second seat if you pay for it--but I'm just fine with it so far. Goddang.

can't win

This week: Helpful commentary on the female form from E!:

And helpful diet wisdom--very old-school--from Kate Moss, quoted in People. I haven't heard this shit since the 70s:

ms. stew

I'm fascinated, when not irritated or infuriated, by the hyper-managed flow of Fat in media imagery. That is, the particular way that images of fat people are let in--or not, usually--for public consumption. Everything is managed to varying degrees, but fat is its own particular problem--TV producers who don't like to feature fat people onscreen as witnesses, for instance, because they "lack credibility."

I can speak only to the print part of Martha Stewart's world (I haven't watched her TV show post-poncho) but there is almost NEVER fat in her magazine: no fat people in the little dinner parties, features on entrepreneurs, models, anything. There is actually a pretty specific beauty ideal attached to the MStew world (very scrubbed, subfusc, JCrew, spare/lean). So I was amused to see this in her blog the other day. Because sometimes you just have to let the fat in, baby. And then, I guess, you call it voluptuous. Which they certainly are, not even particularly fat, but--what can I say, I noticed it. Little essay on class-race (hello)-money-NYC-media-fame-etc. here.

unbelievable

Among the possible calm, reasoned responses to PETA's idiotic new billboard (what the fuck is your problem / are you really that fucking stupid / etc.) the one thing I keep coming back to is: do they really think there are no fat vegetarians? Do they really think this? Do they really think their support base is just thin people? And if so...why exactly do they think this?

Why do you think this, PETA? Are you (lazily) linking a moral imperative with body size? Judging by all their previous campaigns + this one the answer is obviously yes, but I wonder if anybody there (or people like Anthony Bourdain, who hates PETA but sounds surprisingly similar to them at times) thinks about what that means, at base. Not just in its fundamentally fascist implications, but for marketing and organizational functionality in general. Does this mean they miss chances to gather support from fat people in various ways? And if they just don't want fat supporters: are they still happy to take fat people's money? Really?

It's the stupidity and narrowness of the assumption veg = thin that really amazes me. And the at-all-costs imperative of their sloganeering and its breathtaking implications that piss me off and scare me, frankly.

Bottom line: it's only people's dislike of their own bodies, of themselves, that allows campaigns like this to get to the point where somebody is handing somebody money for a billboard, much less get out of some pissy crack-fueled brainstorming session or however PETA came up with it. If they really know and/or don't care that a decent percentage of their supporters are fat, then this billboard is among all its other problems a tacit admission that they approve of the body hatred. And are happy to profit from it.

There are a lot of fat vegetarians. Just noting. Not I, but if I were one, I'm fairly sure this billboard would make me go eat a steak.

p.s. Billboard girl has a really cute suit!

on one aspect of the Regina Benjamin controversy

The controversy over the appointment of Dr. Regina Benjamin is shameful, from my point of view, and revealing of one aspect of how fat prejudice functions. Given that the woman's credentials satisfy in any direction you might slice them, how she looks must have really had to ring some bells to make people talk about it. Especially when Koop and Elders didn't.

I think the real reason Benjamin's size has gotten so much attention is that she has a chubby face. I don't think there would have been nearly the hubhub about this if she had the same body with a face that happened to be thinner. I'm not sure people would have noticed her body, period, which is a fairly conventional size 18-20, if that, not particularly readable in her basic black suit.

People--the media--demonstrate a real lack of "lipoliteracy" (as Mark Graham calls it) in reading images of fat people. People aren't that good at reading images in general, but fat bodies, which tend to be shown in very limited and particular ways, so most people (including other fat people) aren't well-practiced at understanding them, are generally pretty crudely read. There is an inability to distinguish body type from body size, to read relative size in an accurate way, to really see how light, angle, clothing and movement are affecting what they're seeing. To know what size other people really are.

Faces are, in a funny way, how people decide how fat someone is, how fat the rest of someone is. And one thing you notice quickly when you start really looking at fat people, at all people, is that people's faces don't necessarily represent how big (or small) they are. Especially images of faces. Faces can tell you something about a person, but a lot of fat people have fairly thin faces. And vice versa. There isn't a one-to-one corollary. There is a whole world of eating disorders sparked by chubby or round faces that don't match thin bodies.

The face is synecdoche, the repository for information about the whole body. And you can't "pass" if you have a chubby face (as in Benjamin's case). And in reading fat faces a kind of eugenics is employed. There are whole worlds of meaning instantly seen in double chins and chubby cheeks, in jowls and dimples and fat, in even small variations on all of this, most of them bad. Meaning that is drawn not just about the person but about the fatness or otherwise of the rest of the body. The fact that the image of the fat face isn't shown, highlighted, nearly as often as it really exists in this life gives it an extra shock and negative power.

The point here is not to lobby for continued judgement of other people's bodies, so long as it's done "correctly." It is to point out that part of what's so frustrating about the issue of body size in this country is that we don't even really know what we're seeing. It's not okay to be fat, but who knows what that is. "Fat" is one whole side of the bell curve, more than that, a million different things. To make intelligent distinctions, to describe something accurately, is to bring size into focus too much, to allow it to be. We want it to just go away.

The dude on Fox News who decided Dr. Benjamin was obese and therefore "lazy," for instance, was reacting in large part, I am convinced, to her face (her body doesn't even seem particularly visible in the press conference footage). Which seems (to some) to make her look sweet, kind, soft, older, less competitive...compromised. Weak. Lazy. Not authoritarian. Not hard-working. Not intelligent, not focused, not educated. Otherwise we could see it in her face, yes? Instead of the chub?

Dr. Benjamin is obviously, demonstrably, all these things: intelligent, focused, educated, devoted, swimming in credentials and press coverage of every kind to make the point if the other facts of her life don't. That this would be questioned as it has shows how much meaning body size has for people.

There are many other things to talk about with regard to this situation, most notably race: race, class, gender, age, the dominance of the visual media, the importance of looking a part, the way in which we are all scarred in some ways by the body wars. I think it's interesting, though, that body size is the arena in which people's reactions to her nomination have surfaced and have been, in fact, allowed to do so.

mmm...kevinjames

I'd like to lodge an official protest at the on-going frumpification of Kevin James, easily one of the most handsome men in movies these days, but one who is carving quite a career playing every kind of man were not supposed to want. He's obviously participating pretty hard in the frumpifying, not to mention he's funny and can pull stuff off, but still, when you line em all up together: Hitch? (Clueless about women.) I Now Pronounce You...? (Clueless & faking gay.) Paul Blart? (Dorky mall cop.) King of Queens was dorky too, and had a lot of bad thematic through-lines that were sort of in the same vein, but at least he was, you know, a husband.

It's sort of the JohnBelushification, if not the frumpification, I guess. And I'm not claiming anything too noble here other than my own...er...interest. But still. Must every plumpy fattish dude be such a farce? A hilariously out of control 'regular guy' we think we know everything about? It's such a stereotype, period. If I were a guy, I'd be ticked. By the end of his career Belushi was starting to play sweet romantic roles...hope that happens here too. Because Mr. James is really hot.

Dear Oprah --

Dear Oprah,

DON'T EVER APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR WEIGHT AGAIN.

Seriously, PLEASE DON'T EVER APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR WEIGHT AGAIN.

There seems an inclination to laud your public apologies for your size as "honest," in the sense that you are being more straightforward than public figures usually are about the difference between what they say and what they do or just about what you do, period, to maintain TV-ready body image.

I don't find it honest, I find it alternatingly heart-breaking and infuriating. Demeaning, obfuscating, angering. You don't owe anybody an apology for what your body size is. And that means no matter why it is the size it is, a process of which I think you should stop assuming you have complete understanding.

You are the richest, most powerful woman--person--in media, which doesn't mean you aren't a real woman with feelings who has a life outside that label, but you are telling the whole world, over and over--and yourself--that no matter what you do, nothing is more important than what you look like, and that at that you've failed. You say you no longer care about being thin, just healthy, but would you have laid yourself out like this if you were unhealthy and thin? Would you even care?

You have had EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO KNOW BETTER AND CHOOSE NOT TO. You have had all the advice of the world parade by on your stage and you are choosing to ignore it to keep hating yourself. You are not hanging onto "the fat," you are hanging on to your right to dislike yourself.

You are telling all those girls at your school in Africa and all the people who watch your show and all the people who hate you but catch the headlines about you that the most important thing about you is your body size, your weight. That the agonies and self-consciousness of puberty and young adulthood never end, in fact that they trump whatever comes after.

It is a lot to expect any one person to rise above social pressures to be thin, but you know what, that is an expectation I do hold you to. The Oprah Edict you are violating most significantly is the idea of loving yourself. Putting yourself first. Being on your own side. This is a yes/no situation...no mealy-mouthed middle ground. Either you are on your own side or you are laying yourself out ("apologizing") for public ridicule.

You seem to be pretty good at telling the world to back off when you need to (making employees sign silence agreements, for instance). It's very painful to be made complicit in your inability to do it here, where you need to most. I DON'T WANT YOUR APOLOGIES. They offend me. Nor do I want anything else of it. Your body is your business. Your body, in fact, is your body's business, maybe not even your own, quite.

The cynic in me knows that you might have--theoretically--less to talk about if you just made your body off-limits as a motivating factor for story ideas and for getting people to watch your show and identify with you. The hopelessly idealistic part of me catches my breath at just what you could do to actually improve this world if you laid down this issue, once and for all. If you told all the people out there that you are fine the way you are and, frankly, fuck anybody who needs to butt in.

Women need to say fuck you more often. Also who cares, and says who? You can't rationalize your way out of the beauty myth jungle, where the rules aren't fair anyhow. You have to bushwack your way out with sheer faith and a sense that you are loveable and worthy of attention, sex, approbation, approval and the right to exist--even in public--no matter your size.

And remember that taking care of your own health is difficult and an effort worthy of support. And that you should help yourself in its difficulty, not castigate yourself for occasional dips in the radar, as seems to have recently happened.

You gotta wonder when this is going to end, on top of everything else. If this version of 54 is the new 44, I don't want any part of it. Surely one of the virtues of age is just the right to know better.

Shut up please! Thank you.

Yours sincerely,
Liz T.

http://www.oprah.com/contactus

Fatty Life in America

Fatty Life in America
A Play in One Act
by Elizabeth M. Tamny

first performed on the blogger stage Oct 4, 2008
an EMT production

TIME: No time particularly fun
PLACE: The office of a medical professional, any kind
SETTING: Fluorescent, icky, silence broken by occasional crinkle of paper a FAT CHICK is sitting on.

ACT ONE

LIGHTS UP: Enter medical professional of any variety, reading chart.

MED PROF

(Almost disappointed, certainly confused) Are you [emph] sure you're not hypertensive?

LIGHTS DOWN

The End

NOTE: If desired, line can be repeated 20-30 times before lights down.
* All Rights Reserved *
* Please contact EMT agency for performance in schools and community centers*