Manolo for the Big Girl Fashion, Lifestyle, and Humor for the Plus Sized Woman.

A strong black woman trying to pass as a white southern belle

A group of gay men

A syndicated character written by The Manolo

A mousy girl’s alterego

Before I was outed as an actual living person who’s pretty much exactly what you read here, your Auntie Plumcake was accused of being all of these things, and more. The last thing anyone thought was the person writing about her life, loves, shoes and style was an actual person.

But let me tell you a secret: Years before I took my fruity name and before this blog was even a glimmer in The Manolo’s eye, I willed myself to become Miss Plumcake, and now I am. It illustrates today’s lesson:

People Buy What You Sell.

I wasn’t born especially stylish, I didn’t emerge out of Hubert Givenchy’s forehead a fully formed Glamazon. But when I was younger and realized I didn’t really like who I was, I decided to…adjust.  I didn’t fundamentally change who I was any more than adding ginger instead of cinnamon to an apple pie recipes changes the fact it’s an apple pie. And now, my beloved little brother who knows me better than anyone does (Hi little brother! Love you! Thanks for shaving your goatee and not looking like a homeless viking anymore!) says he loves reading my blog because I write just exactly as I talk.

This is different than the idea of “fake it ’til you make it” because it’s not about pretending you’re something you’re not.

It’s about honing the things you have inside you that you like, and graciously ignoring those things that perhaps you don’t love as much, like putting on a flattering outfit, except if you sell an idea long enough, eventually it becomes true and people will accept those things –confidence, beauty, sex appeal, brains– at face value.

So don’t lose hope. If you’re not exactly who you want to be at fifteen –and who is?– don’t change your nature, just rebrand a little. Even if it’s just a tiny glimmer of something inside you, you can fan that flame into a big bonfire of kickassity (is that a word? I don’t think that’s a word. BUT, if I kept using it, soon other people would use it too, and then it would be a word.  See? It works everywhere.) Good luck!

Gin and Tonics,

Auntie Plumcake

Don’t Give a Damn.

Do you know why I love hanging out with cranky old people? I like them because they have mastered the fine art of Not Giving a Damn.

The sooner you can learn to Not Give a Damn the better.

We are constantly bombarded about how we’re supposed to look and act and be and think and live and blah de blah blah blah. Especially since we’re already at fault for being fat and have to make it up to society somehow.

If you don’t have a filter, a little bitchy Giminy Cricket inside your head that says “Hang on, I’m not going to do that.” then you’re sunk. You’re just going to be battered by the waves of pop culture and consumerism until you look like everybody else and have absolutely no personality and you STILL won’t be happy because:

You will never ever be “good enough” in the eyes of popular culture.

Never? Never.

And that’s because people like to be right, and companies like to be rich.  I’ve got my opinions and I share them (for a price.) Companies have their products, and they’ll sell them (for a price.)  But no matter how much any of us insist your world won’t spin the way it ought unless you’ve done this or listened to that, you do not under any circumstances have to Give a Damn.

And I know what you’re thinking. “Yeah, but people already dislike me because I’m fat. Now they will hate me.”

No, they won’t. That’s the amazing thing. People will FLOCK to you, because if you Don’t Give a Damn –provided you’re still a decent human being and socially gracious (there are some people who Don’t Give a Damn but also are socially graceless: These people have no friends)– that signals power, and it’s in our gregarious nature to want to have the approval of powerful pack-members. Meanwhile, if you’re a groveling little thing that plays nicey-nice all the time, I have a theory that people will sense your weakness and insincerity and more often than not will look down on you. Which isn’t to say that you can NEVER give a damn — I bend over backwards for people I genuinely like to make happy, but it’s a choice, not a default position.

It’s difficult, especially since women are supposed to be Nice all the time, but Nice only has one place in my vocabulary, and that’s in Italy.* Be good, not nice. And if you’re not? I don’t give a damn.

Gin and Tonics,

Auntie Plumcake

*Before you pedants send me any more emails: this is a joke.

Don’t Sleep Around.

Okay, I know human sexuality stuff is fraught with peril and honestly I’m just some gal on the internet so you probably shouldn’t let me dictate your intimate interactions BUT I will say this:

Being the fat slut has been done and from what I understand it is really, really hard to rally from that.

At this point you’d probably expect some story ripped from the headlines of my own youth, but actually out of all the many, many questionable choices I made when I was too young to vote, none of them were sexually transmitted. I had a fantastic boyfriend who was my first proper kiss, we dated all through high school and although there was some hanky panky, we abstained.

And you know, I’m glad I did. I’m not saying you should –although you might give it some thought– but I avoided a pitfall a lot of girls, especially big girls, fall into: being easy.

It’s tough being a over-developed and precocious teenager. I looked 20 when I was 13. So do many of you. I had a big sexual appetite, and more importantly I loved the power having sex appeal gave me.  And let’s make no mistake: Sex appeal IS power.  So yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus and if you let him look down your top he’ll probably give you what you want.

In the short term.

In the long term it’s like drinking sea water when you’re shipwrecked: an incredibly tempting and almost certainly fatal bad idea.

I know it’s nice to be wanted.

I know how great that power feels.

I know what a damn pleasant change it is to be accepted, even temporarily, by the type of guy who makes your life miserable when the sun is up and how tempting it is to say yes, especially because part of you wants to do it too.

Here’s something else I know: I know that girls who learn that sex is the only thing they have to offer a man don’t often end up in the sort of relationships they really want, and why would you do anything that would prevent you from getting what you want?

So be thoughtful about your sexual activity.  Not just about safer sex (although ALWAYS practice safer sex) but about what YOU want. What it means now, what it might mean in the future and whether it’s really, truly reflects who you want to be as a person.

Gin and Tonics,

Auntie Plumcake

Don’t be afraid to look stupid.

Picture it: Sicily, 1935.

Wait, I’m channeling, Sophia Petrillo again, hang on…

Picture it: Washington, D.C., 1993

A young Miss Plumcake starts her first day of high school. She is wearing a trop chic vintage mustard yellow cloche that belonged to her great grandmother and an aqua blue Adolfo boyfriend blazer with some seriously significant shoulderpad action. I believe there was also some sort of makeshift bustier involved, and it might have been gold lame, though I can’t quite be sure (I am quite sure I owned a gold lame bustier as a 13 year-old, because I remember buying and then hiding it.)

As you can tell, Miss Plumcake went for A Lot of Look.

Sitting down in my all-grades Spanish class an older boy took one look at me and said “You’re really brave to wear that. I mean it. Really brave.”

Which I guess I was.

Now he was probably making fun of me. I mean I was a chunky, less-than-conformist girl in a yellow suede cloche and possibly a bustier. That’s not really an ideal look for anyone.

Did I look awful? Probably.

Did my world end? No.

I did discover I looked fantastic in hats though, and although I don’t really wear vintage ones all that often anymore –it’s a little too costumey for my tastes now– taking that risk and looking stupid without the world collapsing around my ankles taught me that I could try anything.

So do it. Try anything. If you want to spend two months as a goth and then go straight to pin up girl, punk rocker, dandy, farm girl, whatever, do it. People will always talk about you, even if you’re the most perfect conformist little darling to ever shake a pom, so why not enjoy yourself?

But word to the wise: lame sometimes itches.

Gin and Tonics,

Auntie Plumcake

Lesson The First:

It gets better.

You’ve probably heard a lot about Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project.  Savage and his husband have established a project dedicated to giving hope to LGBT youth, many of whom are bullied, confused or depressed to the point –entirely too often to the point– of suicide.

It gets better for being a fat kid, too.

High school sucks. It just does. Even when it’s great it sucks, because being a teenager sucks and although you’ll look back with a sort of yearning once you’ve got car payments and rent and a stupid job in a stupid cube where your stupid cube neighbor WON’T STOP CRACKING HER GUM *CRACK CRACK CRACK* ALL DAY LONG OH MY GOD WHAT IS *WRONG* WITH YOU??? at how carefree your life was, don’t you believe it.

No one who has ever done or been anything close to interesting ever looked back on high school as their glory days.

I actually didn’t have a terrible time of it in high school. I had a wonderful boyfriend, got good grades, was relatively popular and talented and even was homecoming princess.  And still it sucked. The thing is, high school is like the first time you drive your borrowed luxury vehicle into a Mexican border town at midnight, drink the most rotted tequila this side of a paralytic worm, get violently sick all over your aformentioned luxury vehicle  –which you parked on the street–  and try to communicate with the incredibly amused townsfolk in VERY LOUD FRENCH when regular-volume French wasn’t meeting with the desired success. It’s awful, but you’ll have terrific stories to tell at cocktail parties and you can remind yourself in grim situations that things might be bad, but at least you’ll never have to go through THAT again.

You’ll graduate. You’ll probably go to college (but seriously consider taking a year off to travel first. I didn’t and I regret it in many ways) and soon the people you went to high school with who were the most important movers and shakers in your world will be little specks on your memory. The ones you’ll cyberstalk every five years or so to see they’ve gone gratifyingly bald or have ugly children.

The point is: Don’t give up hope.  Don’t think that what you’re going through now will mean anything in five, ten, fifteen years. It won’t. Unless you let it.