Fat Pig

Welcome back to Ytossie. I have been gone for a while, since election night to be precise. No, I wasn't in a Bush-reelection- depressive state, unlike many of my fellow boho types. I've been facing a few - uh - challenges, not the least of which has been planning my wedding, which will basically be an elopement except pre-planned. You know, no one invited. Just us and some mail-order minister blowing a conch shell and draping us in orchids while talking about freedom, creativity, and the lyrics of Jimi Hendrix.

Now, don't get me wrong. Love the family. I do. But the "big day" is set to be just us. So why is it that I spend almost every day in the gym, doing reps, picturing the tankini and sarong?

In the midst of this, I went to see the new Neil LaBute play, Fat Pig, which was playing in the West Village at a tiny little theater on Christopher Street. This is a play about a successful man with a harpie ex-girlfriend and beastly friend at work. He starts dating a heavy woman, and, in typical LaBute fashion, things get as ugly as possible from there. For starters, let me say that Andrew "Weekend At Bernie's 2" McCarthy acted circles around everyone else in the play.

Ultimately, I have to give Neil credit - he leaves no stone of ugliness between the genders unturned in his search for material. And the last time I saw weight issues tackled in earnest, I believe it was in the horrific and permanently damned Shallow Hal. But in LaBute's grafting of the model of interracial couples onto that of - what? - intersize couples, he missed a few things. He made the subtle discomfort into blatant outrage. He wrote an office as though it were a high school, with people running to show the photo of "the fatty" in the cafeteria, and highly juvenile commentary firing through emails, all around, between colleagues and friends.

I think we can all agree, for lots of people, the skinniness monster is big. It can involve a ferocious competitiveness between women, and degrading dismissiveness in men. But even then, bitchiness tends to be a subtle art. Successful down-looking involves maintaining your plausible deniability at all times, much like Nixon and Dean tried to. The play would have been better for me if it hadn't involved a main character facing a weird 1984-like world of stark choices when it comes to junk in the trunk. LaBute's attempt to demonize the characters who held these beliefs did not change the fact that theirs was the moral of his story. He wrote a world where weight rules all, and if the implication is that it's wrong, but true, I find that to be a tremendous literary cop out. I don't like cheap values disguised as moral complexity.

I'll be thinking of this as I hit the treadmill this week to attempt to look good enough for my private wedding that no one is invited to.