Careful What You Wish For

My column talks this week about how much Mad Men’s Sally Draper seems NOT to want to be like her mother hen she grows up, trying to make a whole day out of defrosting the fridge and putting down new shelf paper and all.She might not want to be like curvy Joan Holloway either, though it’s too early to tell. It  goes on to speculate whether Joan wore a fatsuit  under her clothes in the first few seasons because she does seem to look just a tad different now, a little less like two scoops of vanilla spilling out of an ice cream sundae.

I said I'd post proof of my own brush with fatsuits on the blog here. It came when the owner of our local kids' theater company once lent one to my little boy for Historical Impersonators Day. So here is the child below as William Howard Taft, the president so hefty he couldn’t fit in the White House bathtubs.

Because it's fun pretending to be what you're not, superfun to wonder what you'll end up looking like.

I guess I'll add a picture of  me as a harem girl in the big camp production of "The King and I." Notice how everyone on the stage looks properly clued in; everyone but the one with the ripply hair; check out what she's looking at,the dope.

I wanted so much to look like Joan Holloway, and then it happened and now what I wouldn’t give to have looked less like a Hot Fudge Sundae and more like a tall slender Lime Rickey.

So today I wear high necks. Or else I put my tops on wrong way to. "Excuse me!" people are always saying to me at the Post Office. "Excuse me but I think you have your .... shirt on backwards?"

I don't care.  My friend Michael Dwyer and I are Irish and he says our people have been wearing their clothes backward for centuries. To ward off the Little People he says, and that's fine too, because you know GOD FORBID I get snatched up by Fairies, swapped for some baby and forced to start the whole thing again.

Little Michael (R) as William Howard Taft with other historical impersonators

followed by......

me at 12 (second from Left) worrying if I look allright in that two-piece Jantzen