© 2003 Dan Sherman
As a baby boomer I was lucky to grow up in a time when we never had
shortages. There was always plenty of food, so much that people would sneak
up to our house at night like evil Tooth Fairies and leave sugary snacks
designed to knock out a few more teeth.
When I was nine I found a sample box of pop tarts hanging from doorknobs of
every house, like apples in the Garden of Eden. I didn't know that one bite
of those sugar lumps and I'd be addicted and banished to Chubby Land
forever.
But my parents grew up as Depression babies when there WERE shortages,
and they would save EVERYTHING, so that drawers were bursting with Rosie the Riveter posters, Roosevelt campaign buttons, old Playboy magazines (well, THAT was okay).
Now I understand my folks because we're in the midst of the Great American Fabric Shortage. If you've been to a mall lately, you've see teenage girls wearing shirts designed for Barbie dolls so they have to expose two feet of
flesh. I hope some farmer grows more cotton so we can clothe these semi-naked girls before some harem kidnaps them. But don't hurry. Thanks.
Teenage guys could chip in a few barge-fulls of fabric, because they prowl the mall wearing workout suits into which you could fit the entire U.S.
Congress plus Pavarotti.
They also wear sweatshirts with the hoods up as if they were loitering by
the North Pole location of Video Games 'R' Making You Antisocial Mutants. Is there also a body heat hortage?
I used to wear sweatshirts like that, but I wore the hood up indoors only to lose weight. Here's why.
In high school I got cut from the basketball team, and I was dejected. But my friends were going out for the wrestling team, so I joined them and found myself in a square room with mats lining the walls, the heat set at a balmy 600 degrees.
In the center of the room were guys with flattened donuts on their ears wearing tights and lunging at invisible foes like Peter Pans who had smoked too much pixie dust. I felt out of place and unsure I could ever learn the
moves, let alone look manly in tights.
But the team had the same stringent hiring policy as the Post Office: They'd take anybody! I weighed 165 lbs. so they put me in the 168 lbs. weight class on the JV squad, meaning my opponents had arms twice the size of Godzilla with the same notion that humans were essentially sushi. We did no mat cleaning that year because these monsters used me as a large leotard-clad Hoover.
The next year I went out for the varsity team at 141 lbs. But to do that I had to lose and keep off 25 lbs. BEFORE they invented those websites selling diet pills guaranteeing you can eat a truck full of Snickers and still weigh less than a Kleenex.
So, I would endure a torturous wrestling practice, come home and have a gourmet dinner of air, sprint five miles around the neighborhood, then spend the rest of the night doing jumping jacks in 37 layers of clothing in the
bathroom which I turned into a steam parlor by blasting hot water in the shower. What ABOUT the gas bill, Dad?
I made the varsity team and weighed 141 lbs. for every match, and my friends
called me The Skeleton. But I had fun and DID made extra money by renting myself out as a Halloween decoration.
Looking at these teenage guys in the mall with their hoods up, I wonder if
they are starving themselves like I did. Hard to see because their clothes are so baggy, both Gen X AND Y could be hiding in there.
I walk by them, past the women's stores selling shirts teenier than hydrogen
molecules, munching my sugar-frosted breakfast pastry. I'm on my way to Macys to pick up some more condo-sized Dockers.
They don't call me The Skeleton any more. They just call me chubby.
Dan Sherman is a Reno, NV-based writer. Email him at
dan@danshermanonline.com.
Print
