The Fat Chick Diaries

One of the truly beautiful things about my life is that my commute home from work takes me right under Times Square. On any given evening, if I want to I can rise up out of the ground, walk half a block, and partake of a smorgasbord of first-run movies ranging from summer blockbusters to a surprising range of indie films.

Take tonight for example. Earlier today, it suddenly occurred to me why I can’t stop watching the new Star Trek film. It’s this: Eric Bana is the most delicious space villain ever. The moment when he makes contact with the Enterprise and says, “Hello Christopher, I’m Nero,” is worth the entire price of admission right there. So tonight, I stopped by the AMC Empire 25 and caught the 6:30 show.

Afterward, as I walked through the Times Square subway station to hop the 7 back to Queens, I passed by a advertisement on the wall that featured a group of gorgeous, happy, energetic, well-dressed fat people.

Wait. WHAT?

This demanded a closer inspection. Sometimes you see fat people in ads, but they’re NEVER gorgeous, happy, energetic, and well-dressed. And if they are, they’re certainly not in groups. Something must be amiss.

Turns out, there’s a new reality show premiering June 29 on Oxygen. It’s called Dance Your Ass Off. Okay, so it’s a weight loss show. It starts with the premise that fat is a problem to be remedied. It’s not, strictly speaking, about fat acceptance. But damn, those fatties looked GOOD! The women had their hair done, their makeup on, and they were dressed to the nines in cute shoes and dresses that shimmered. The guys were handsome and neat and clean and looked like somebody I’d really like to date. And every single one of them had a look in their eye like, “Sit back and watch, skinny couch potatoes, while my voluptuous self dances circles around you.”

I do not trust American television to do right by fat folks. Especially not if it’s reality TV. I mean, look at what we have so far: The Biggest Loser, which claims to be about transforming lives, but is really about showing us images of sweaty, panting fat folks on treadmills, who will later be dressed in spandex bike shorts and sports bras and placed on a scale, as if showing their fat rolls to all of America is a necessary aspect of transforming their lives. No thanks. And then there’s I Want To Save Your Life, where a shameless self-promoter with questionable credentials stalks fat people and jumps on them for every bad habit he can find, all in the name of wanting to save them from themselves. Oh, and cashing a big fat paycheck while he’s at it. And then there’s the show where they make over fat people so they can go out on dates– the unspoken assumption being that fat people are undatable without massive strategic interventions from dating experts, fashion consultants, and hair-and-makeup people. No thanks.

So when I got home tonight, I watched the trailer. Setting aside for a moment the fact that, as I said, the show is mostly about weight loss, overall I really liked what I saw. It appears that the fat contestants are provided with personal trainers and dance coaches so they can learn to dance beautifully and vigorously. They are provided with dance costumes that are sexy but not exploitative, and judges who appear to be able to focus on the dancing and not on the fat. As much as a show based on weight loss can, this show appears to treat fat people with dignity and respect and a reasonable and like capable people. I plan to watch it.

Oh yeah, and here’s today’s famous person sighting: Ali Velshi was standing outside the Time Warner building tonight when I walked past it. I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen everybody from CNN except my girl Candy Crowley!

New York City is FULL of dogs. So much so, in fact, that the sidewalks in Manhattan pretty much perpetually smell like dog urine. It’s one of the reasons why a good rainstorm is such a wonderful thing in New York, as long as it doesn’t happen while I’m outside. The rain washes the pee off the sidewalks, you see.

But I digress.

There’s dogs, y’all. Thousands of them. I once sat for about an hour and a half in the Starbucks on the corner of 9th Ave and 59th St. doing homework for a grad class, and just for the hell of it, I tallied up all the dogs I saw walking by. There were about 60 of them. No lie.

Given the limited size of most Manhattan apartments, it’s amazing the number of really big dogs you see. Somebody in the neighborhood where I work has two very large labrador retrievers. WTF? Labradors in a Manhattan apartment? Somebody else has some sort mastiff, and yet another person has an Old English sheepdog.

But the little bitty dogs are really the most popular ones. In particular, Manhattanites seem to be obsessed with pugs. Some days it seems like I can’t walk two blocks without seeing a pug. Even Queens is full of them. I guess they’re ideal for apartment dwellers, plus they are cute in an ugly sort of way. But the pug obsession is out of control. Just to amuse myself, I count the number of pugs I see each day. Today’s pug count: three. The most ever in one day: seven. Seven pugs, y’all. That’s a bit much, don’t you think?

What’s really amazing is that the pugs grown on you after a while. I used to think pugs were hands-down the ugliest dogs ever. Now, I find them oddly adorable. I’m also getting into French bulldogs. It probably doesn’t hurt that I started out obsessed with Boston Terriers, which are also in that same squished-face-little-doggy category.

Something else I’m starting to count as I acclimate to living and working in the big city: famous people. So far, the list includes Jonathan Alter, Lou Dobbs, N’gai Croal, and John King. You can kind of tell I walk past the Newsweek and CNN buildings on my way to and from work each day, huh? I’ve also seen Andie McDowell, Melissa Leo, and a character actor who has shown up on Law & Order at least twice, but whose name I do not know.

So I’m thinking I may add the Daily Pug Count to the bottom of my blog posts from now on, just so you can understand how pugly the city really is.