For those of you who really enjoy watching fat women parade around in skimpy swimwear, you’ll be pleased to know that there is now a Big and Beautiful beauty pageant. This bit of information comes to us from my grandmother, who saw it on Sally Jessy Raphael.
According to my grandmother, who is a very reliable source, the only rule for entering the contest was that you had to weigh at least 250 pounds, a requirement shared by many traveling carnivals. The pageant itself was much like the Miss America Pageant, only far more disgusting. The women had to peform a talent (eating did not qualify), be interviewed (“What are your career goals?” “I don’t know. Pass the potatoes.”), and — please sit down, if you have not already done so — model swimsuits.
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Those asterisks indicated a brief period of silence, to give you time to realize the implications of my last statement. My only regret is that my grandmother — a dear, sweet, old woman who has never done anything to deserve such a fate — had to witness this. She must surely be scarred for life after seeing a dozen women, many of whom require license plates, wander around what must have been a steel-reinforced stage wearing swimsuits. I pity her.
But as long as we’re making fun — uh, discussing — fat people, let me tell you about a guy I saw at the courthouse the other day.
See, I had to go to court because I got a ticket for going 80 miles an hour on the freeway. As my mother and I — hey, there’s something I don’t understand. If you’re a minor, which I am, and you go to traffic court, your parent or guardian has to go with you. But it seems to me my mother’s not going to do me a lot of good once I get to court — where was she when I was doing 80 down the freeway? THAT’S when I needed parental guidance — not in court, where I’m already duly intimidated. “Slow down!” my mother would have shrieked in a parental manner. All she can do in court is give me dirty looks when the judge tells me how much I’m going to have to pay.
Anyway, we were outside the courthouse when this man came be. Now, I am not one to make fun of people’s problems, but this guy was FAT. He must have weighed 1,400 pounds, at least. He was not Big and Beautiful. He was Big and Fat. But as he came lumbering past us, we noticed that this incredibly fat man — a man who single-mouthedly could deplete the entire food supply of a third world nation in one sitting — had, by some freak of nature, some bizarre twist of circumstance, somehow managed to acquire a pair of blue jeans that were TOO BIG for him. Bear in mind that while a normal man has maybe a size 36 waist, this man’s waist must have been a size 300, and he had somehow managed to find a pair of pants with a 310 waist.
The result was that he had to hold them up to keep them from falling down. Now, I think it is safe to assume that Levi’s does not ordinarily manufacture pants of that magnitude. My guess is that a piece of factory machinery went haywire and started making circus tents instead of trousers.
But there are still many unanswered questions.
1) Why didn’t he try the pants on before he bought them? It seems to me that if you’re going to go to the trouble of hunting down a clothing store that has a Fat Slobwear department, you may as well go to the trouble of making sure the darn things fit you before you pay for them.
2) Is it possible that the pants used to fit, but that he — stay with me here — LOST WEIGHT? I would be inclined to say no, because I think once you break the 800 pound mark, the goal of losing weight is replaced by the goal of getting out of bed in the morning unassisted.
3) What was this guy doing in court? He can’t possibly have been occupying a vehicle that was going too fast, unless it was going downhill. My guess is that he got a ticket for double parking his butt.