As many of you know, it is the hap hap-happiest time of the year; the beginning of premier league Proper Football all over the world, and as I’m organizing my fantasy team and plotting my Saturday mornings (and afternoons, and potentially evenings if I keep getting these mezcal hangovers) from now until the end of May, it occurred to me: Fat Fighting is a sport, and all girls –almost all girls– are expected to play.

Women are encouraged to follow, worship and obsess over the Fat Fighting the way men are over sports. Somewhere along the way, it was decided we were supposed to care about some actress’ visible rib count the way some men worry about their favorite baseball player’s RBI.

Like any sporting fan, there’s pain involved. Teams are fickle, players disappoint. There are drunken midnight promises made to God and self that get called off the moment your side scores a miracle or loses the penalty shoot out. You devote time, passion, money and so, so much emotional energy to what…some men kicking a ball? Some number no one else will ever see, much less care about?

No one understands you, no one cares.

No one wants to sit next to you at the bar because you’re just going to go on and on about points and weekly whatevers until someone –quite possibly you– gets stabbed in the eye just to break the monotony.

Still, I understand the appeal.

It’s not just suffering –unless you support Arsenal, then yeah, it’s pretty much suffering, but that can also be enjoyable in a martyred sort of way– there’s also the elation when your side pulls it off.

I accidentally broke a bar stool when Madrid scored a penalty kick against Barcelona last season, and we all know someone who did a victory lap when they finally fit into the dress that needed a shoehorn and some axle grease just a few months before.

And then of course it becomes a compulsion.

Skipping work to watch the Clásicos (no, I’m not prepared to talk about the Supercopa yet…give me time) spending money you don’t have on tickets, whiling away your Saturday mornings getting drunk in an expat bar even if you’re not a journalist. Where, precisely will the madness end?

I think about the Diet and Beauty industry and how easy it is to get lured in.

We learn it from our parents, from our friends. We support a team because it’s the one we’ve always been around. It’s a way to bond with our social group, or expand the one we’ve already got.

But what if we just don’t LIKE that sport or at least don’t want to go to EVERY game?

Obviously we can choose not to engage, but at what price? Do we lose community? Is it a community we mind losing?

I’d be extremely interested in hearing about the experiences of any of you who had been heavily (er, you know what I mean) into the dieting/obsessing/calorie-counting lifestyle and come out the other side, or anyone who feels their unwillingness to follow that particular “sport” has caused them social woes. Put it in the comments!

Today I was going to write about something incredibly important: Namely, I found a really fantastic long-wearing neutral-but-better lip color for cheap yesterday and I want to shout my love for it over the reverberate hills. However, today the base color is pilling a little bit (I think I would’ve preferred a gloss to a balm as the top coat) and I’ve got something even nearer and dearer to my heart than functional and affordable cosmetics.

Men.

DAMN I love men.

I mean sure, individually they can be problematic and loathsome, but generally speaking I like guys.

Now let’s not pretend I’m breaking new ground, or have a single thing figured out about relationships that’s going to make your life better. I’m not and I don’t, but I do like men and I think it’s a damn shame there are so many barriers we put up, especially as big girls, that –although we probably come by them honestly– put us in an adversarial relationship with men at, uh, large.

Because men? Are kinda great.

First of all, you can sleep with them. I really feel this can’t be overstated. You certainly don’t have to sleep with them (ever!) and plenty of women don’t, but it’s a nice option to have. Plus they’re not women. Now don’t get me wrong, I think women are fab. Some of my best friends are women, many of whom were born that way, and yet there’s something to be said for the whole la différence thing that’s been vive-ing for years in France and although the idea of dating a French man ever EVER again takes me from zero-to-fetal position in under six seconds, (and frankly I already have a Birkin, so I don’t need to!) they’ve got a point.

And the reciprocal side is: Men love me too.

Yes, even though I’m fat, opinionated, and crazy as a a hamster in a g-string a good 40-50% of my waking life, they still love me.

You may think I’ve got some special potent allure. Hell no. I assure you, I’m a pretty enough girl but I’ve got all special potent allure of a decomposing ferret. Men like me for two reasons (no, not those two reasons, although thank YOU Lane Bryant plunge bra): I like myself and I like them.

That’s it. No special allure, no seven simple tricks. I got nothin’ but a loud mouth, a flawless rack and a great appreciation for men –even the ones I don’t want to see naked– and myself.

And let’s talk about the guys we don’t want to sleep with. The guys at work, our guy friends, because unless you’re the reincarnation of Blanche Devereaux, odds are the vast majority of the men you meet will fall into this category.

It’s important to like these guys too. Or heck, maybe it isn’t important, but it makes life a lot more fun if you can flirt shamelessly and harmlessly with these fellas instead of becoming “One of the Boys” (ASK ME how much I hate that term. You do not have to give up your gender identity to have male friends. I promise.) or living in an Us vs Them dichotomy of grimness, pink books and cats.

And then there are the guys we DO want to sleep with.

I worry about my big sisters who say they want to date but haven’t been out with a man in X years.

Sure there are guys who are dicks out there, especially if you’re fat. But you don’t want to waste your time with them anyway so it’s no loss.

However, there are also a ton of great guys out there and a lot more of them than maybe you’d think are perfectly happy to go out with bigger women. I get asked out on dates all the time (sometimes even by guys who are neither drunk nor homeless!) and as I said before, I assure you I have no special man-trapping qualities, I’m not a bad lookin’ gal but no one’s going to confuse me with Carmen Dell’orefice any time soon. The best I can figure is they keep coming because they want to buy what I’m selling, and they want it because I believe and more importantly project what I’ve got going on –and I’m talking the whole package, body, brains, crazy and all– isn’t just worth having, it’s worth getting on all fours and begging for.

What do you all think about the “gender wars”, men and big girls, men as friends in general and the whole shebang?

One more note  about operas and fat ladies (see what I did there? With the note? Because it’s like music, get it?)
Soprano Daniela Dessi walked out of the role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata when director Franco Zeffirelli--you’ll remember him from the Romeo and Juliet we all saw in junior high with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting– said she was too fat to sing one of opera’s most famous consumptives.

THIS is La Dessi (with friends):

What
a
COW.

By the way, that is EXACTLY what I wear each morning as my favorite houseboy attends to my toilette (in my head).

Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with La Traviata or La Dame aux Camélias the Alexandre Dumas fils novel (his daddy wrote The Three Musketeers which incidentally has 30% less fat than other classic French adventure novels) on which the opera was based, it’s your tried-and-true Consumptive Parisian Hooker with a Heart of Gold story à la Moulin Rouge except for, you know, not awful in every conceivable way (I’m sorry it just IS and not even Ewan McGregor’s hotness is going to change the fact that Baz Luhrmann directs like a coked-up housefly with electrodes on his balls.)

Marguerite, renamed Violetta in the opera, was based on courtesan Marie Duplessis with whom Dumas fils had a torrid affair before she died at 23.

She’s seen here wearing a white camellia. Apparently Duplessis wore a white camellia when she was available to entertain guests  and a red one when she was having her Special Lady Time, which I suppose is a lot more elegant than MY tell which involves taking the safety off my .38.

So if Zeffirelli –who has always been for realism in casting– wanted to cast a sickly-thin 23 year old in the role, then why didn’t he? Is his Google finger broken? Because a quick image search showed me exactly what La Dessi looks like.  MAYBE it’s because it’s nearly impossible to find someone that young who can carry a principal with meaning and artistic flair and even LESS likely to find someone capable of singing that role who doesn’t weigh at least a buck fifty.

In fact, the only one I know to have done a credible job –and I’m not saying there aren’t others– is Beverly Sills when she sang Violetta in 1951.  The “youngest prima donna in captivity” was 22 and although she was a good bit slimmer than Dessi, no one was going to confuse Bubbles with a consumptive waif.

Ms Dessi says:

‘I can accept criticism before I put pen to paper but not afterwards. I was working well with the conductor of the orchestra but the problem these days is that theatrical directors have too much say.’

Ms Desi [sic] added: ‘I’m stunned. I still can’t believe what I heard him say. I am 1.60 metres tall, weigh 65 kg and take a size 44. There – that’s the first time I have given my vital statistics in public.’

So basically this woman  is 5’3″ and wears about a size 14, she had the role and had been rehearsing. Then Zeffirelli calls her “too portly to perform” and Dessi walks out, as does her husband who was playing the male principal and the show went on with two lesser voices.

Perfect!

I mean, I’m not super bright, but isn’t a big part of opera the singing? Because I kind of think it is.  Like,  if  it was just a bossy woman with a great rack and interesting taste in headgear  yelling at people for three hours  then I feel like I’d be offered more roles than I am, instead of the current number which is –let me rummage through my datebook– exactly zero.

Shout out to Sarahbyrdd for being the first reader to bring this to my attention!

So I was clicking through Style.com’s “12 Reasons to be Cheerful in 2010” with a bit of fear and loathing. Conde Nast is not historically a friend of the fatly, so I was interested to see three of their reasons –that’s a full 25% in some quarters– had something to do with fashion beyond the double-zeros.

First there was the downer we discussed yesterday, which was all about how Prada refused to design for non-model extras as the costume designer of the Met’s production of Attila. Bah and humbug and, as you may recall, suck it.

Then there was the bit about Mark Fast scoring a line with Topshop.  Fast, if you’ll recall, was the young buck who used to make his clothes only in one size but who sent down three plus-sized models the runway for Spring 2010, causing two of his stylists to quit.

I very much Do Not Love his clothes, but I love Mr Fast for using plus size models as models, not as tokens in his ultra-shredded sexpot show.

Then there was a note –and this is the most hopeful of all– about how models like Lara Stone (a size 4 sometimes 6) and Catherine McNeil –who has been getting a lot of flack for gaining weight and now looks to be a size 4– are getting tons and tons of work as the trend swings away from stick-thin and back to merely very slim.

According to style.com:

“If McNeil, Stone, and Gemma Ward—another reemerging catwalker dealing with negative body-image hype—were the new prototypes for healthier-looking models, we’d be much relieved. For now, there’s always Crystal Renn.”

This is exciting. This is REALLY exciting. Because one size 12 model in a lineup of thirty double-naughts is a gimmick, this is CHANGE. If we can get back to where a size 6 is model-normal, then maybe a size 12 model won’t seem so out of the ordinary. Maybe young girls won’t be so likely to develop eating disorders to starve themselves into a shape they’ll never EVER naturally be.  We’ve been in Waif World for about 15 years now –remember when Kate Moss was the thinnest model on the runway?– and there’s a change in the air. Whee!

Although considerably less likely to sleep with me than his comedy partner –and previous Monday Hotness– Hugh Laurie (and I can’t say with real honesty that the Laurie odds are incredibly high as it is) Stephen Fry might actually be my favorite of the two and for that reason, and many many more, he is today’s Monday Hotness.

I came across the rampant twitterer when I was but a wee lass when Jeeves and Wooster made its way onto public television, so it’s only fitting we start our Monday Hotness, coincidentally featuring three of my favorite things on earth: Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and cocktails.

He came up through the Cambridge Footlights, along with pretty much every other British comedy genius (including most of the Pythons, the Goodies, Mitchell and Webb, Punt and Dennis plus Douglas Adams, Emma Thompson and a bit surprisingly, Germaine Greer).

…admit it, he’s kind of working that outfit.

He’s also directly responsible for three of my favorite all-time series: the aforementioned J&W,  Kingdom wherein he plays Peter Kingdom, (a solicitor in a small East Anglia fishing village full of eccentrics –think Gilmore Girls, but smarter and slightly darker– with a car even more bitchin’ than mine, the first season is available on Hulu)

He’s also the host of Q.I., the funniest panel show I’ve ever seen.

Q.I. stands for Quite Interesting, and although I could try to explain it, you really need to watch a clip for yourself, a surefire hit for all my beloved Pain-in-the-Ass Pedants.

(this might not work because of the New Evil WordPress)

Fun Fact: For fans of Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility screenplay, you have Stephen Fry to thank for that. Apparently the night before La Thompson was supposed to submit the screenplay, the file got corrupted. Knowing Fry was a technogeek, she jumped into a taxi in the middle of the night, wearing just her night things and hauled her entire entire computer to Fry’s house. It took him eight hours to fix it and the world was once again made safe for bonnet movies and puffy shirts.

Plus he has the best wryly amused charmingly supercilious gaze of all time:

If I could make this face, I’d never make any other.

Fry also has the good sense to be interested in my favorite eras, namely the late Victorian through the 1930s.  He portrayed Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde (as pictured above.  How have I not seen this movie?! Especially with the beautiful Jude Law as Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas his Special Gentleman Friend.)

He’s also responsible for adapting the screenplay of one of my favorite novels, Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh into the film Bright Young Things, which he also directed to great success. It really is such a gorgeous, engrossing, pathetic film. Plus you get David Tennant with a bristly mustache.

Plus, he loves his color. I love a big man who isn’t afraid to wear brights.

And just when I thought I couldn’t love him more, Stephen Fry joined Mark Cawardine, co-author with the late Douglas Adams of one of my favorite books of all time Last Chance to See to retrace 20 years on, the search for the endangered animals Adams and naturalist Cawardine set out to find in 1990.

Back in 1990, when Adams first started his adventures in the wilderness, Fry was living in Douglas Adam’s house and was an unseen part of the action, serving as home-base for the novelist’s communications.  As you know Adams died entirely too young in 2001, so Fry’s follow-up and homage to his friend is an especially touching tribute.

The “Gitane” mary janes from Repetto with an offset spout heel that just kills me.  If you’re sensing a theme, you’re not imagining it; gitane translates to gypsy although Nice Girls, when referring to the Roma and Romani people, would never use that word.