Today I Am a Ma'am: and Other Musings On Life, Beauty, and Growing Older Read Online Free Page B

to dinner with Jonathan when he started to argue with himself about ordering dessert: “No, no, you won’t have that cake, you’re fat as a pig— I’ll eat what I want —Listen, I’ve had about enough of you— Shut up, I’m ordering —Fatty, fatty, two by four— I’ll eat cake and I’ll eat it with ice cream! ”
    My friend Carol, who had always been thin as a rail, was complaining about how she couldn’t stop eating. “I used to have a voice in my head that would tell me, ‘No, don’t take that. Don’t have that. Stop.’ I don’t have a voice anymore. I just eat until there’s no more food.” Boy, I know how that feels. I was the queen of the crash diet. Up and down, yo-yo style. There’s a food fool in a lot of women. Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of it!
       Busted
    Speaking of cops . . .
    Some women feel a certain embarrassment about admitting that we’re on a diet. For some reason we think thin thighs are worth more if they’re endowed naturally. Although I have a long history of sneaking “goodies,” I have occasionally extended my sneaking to diet foods. One day I was driving in Beverly Hills, drinking a can of Slim•Fast. A policeman pulled up behind me on his motorcycle. He was young and tan and handsome, and he was motioning me to pull over. I checked my face in the mirror, ran my fingers through my hair, and stuck my Slim•Fast can under the seat. When he walked up to the driver’s side window, I gave him my best smile. “Yes, officer, how can I help you?”
    He didn’t smile back. “Show me the can, lady,” he ordered, peering past me into the car.
    “What can?” I asked brightly.
    “You know what can. The beer can.”
    I just kept smiling. “Why?” I asked stupidly. For some reason, I preferred him to think I was drinking a beer than to admit I was guzzling Slim•Fast on the road.
    “Come on, lady.” He was getting impatient.
    “Look,” I offered, “I’ll take the test, walk a straight line, whatever you want. Breathalyze me. You’ll see I’m not drunk.”
    “Just-show-me-the-can.”
    So I reached down and pulled out the can of strawberry Slim•Fast. He gaped at it, and then he started to roar with laughter. I could still hear him long after his motorcycle had gone a half mile down the road.
       Weighty Matters
    Many of Rhoda’s jokes focused on weight—although Rhoda was hardly fat. She just wasn’t rail thin like Mary. In one episode, Rhoda ran into a guy with her car and took the opportunity to get a date. After she hit him, she asked him to dinner. Later she was at Mary’s apartment all excited about her date. Mary offered her a snack—some bacon curls—and she refused, saying, “I gotta lose ten pounds before eight o’clock.” That line got incredible laughs from the studio audience.
    Then Rhoda’s date showed up at the door, accompanied by his cute little blond wife. Rhoda introduced him to Mary: “Mary, this is my date, Mr. and Mrs. Armand Linton.” Then Rhoda proceeded to dump the bacon curls into her lap and start shoveling them into her mouth. The audience roared.
    Looking back, I see that under the humor was actually a kind of sad truth. Way before I was cast in the role of Rhoda, I had the art of self-deprecation down pat from long years of practice. I didn’t have great writers handing me punch lines, but I carried around my own arsenal. When I was an aspiring actress, and obsessive about my weight, my roommate Arlene once said, “You crack me up. When you walk into a room, it’s as if you announce, ‘Hello, I’m Valerie Harper and I’m fat. There! I said it before you did.’” She was right. And I wasn’t fat, even if I wasn’t Twiggy-thin, either. But think about it—at least in the days of Rhoda, they scripted a character who was worried about her weight, who talked about eating and being fat, who said things like, “I thought chocolate was a major food group.” You never even see that today. I’ve