Aporkalypse Now

Well: hello again, friends. I'm back from a glorious week in Long Beach Island, NJ. All I can say is: wow. Amazing beauty. Total peace. Tremendous enjoyment. You Jersey folks have been holding out on me! I've never enjoyed a vacation as much as this one. Along with my sister, her adorable boys, my mom, and two beloved cousins, I stayed in a beautiful beach house right on the Atlantic. A 35 second walk to the beach. A deck with deliciously comfortable chairs where we sat together every morning and chatted over breakfast in the ocean air, and had cocktails most nights. We even had a designated cocktail theme each evening (the cosmos were my favorite). My cousin JoAnn, a strong a courageous woman in her own right, also happens to be an amazing professional chef who cooked the most gorgeous and authentic paella I've ever eaten. Jeanine, my other cousin, kept me laughing - and more importantly - thinking, every time we talked. And best of all, I got to spend a week with two of my favorite people in the world, Connor and Ryan, who showed me that I could really enjoy the beach, and basically forced me to get on a boogie board for the first time in my life. "We know it's not fun for you," seven year old Ryan quipped while standing on the shoreline, "but it's really fun for us to watch you getting messed up by the waves."

I and my crazy awesome Italian family also managed to consume some form of pork every day, until we finally started calling our sojourn, "doing the Porkfecta." This was capped off by an insane late night conversation about Taylor ham which was presided over by my mother, who in her long ago and misspent youth was a huge fan of the stuff. I lived in Philadelphia for almost three years, never once had it. Perhaps it's because the packaging makes me think it has spent the past forty-plus years sitting in a warehouse. I mean, you just don't see design sensibilities or fonts like this anymore:


I'm not a great vacationer, not a summer or a beach person, but there was something truly magical about the week. Normally, when I go on vacation, I start counting the days until I get home. Unfortunately, I'm just not the kind of person who gets turned on by exploring the unknown or seeing new places - I mean, it's nice, I love the perspective change it imparts, but I'm a homebody at heart. I start missing my friends, my stuff, my routines. But this time, I really didn't want to leave. Maybe it's because this was the kind of vacation where I could kind of bring routine and the comforts of home with me - except that this time, those comforts revolved around reading out on the deck early in the morning, helping to defrost shrimp and cut up Jarlsberg for cocktail hour, heading out to explore the town with my mom, taking the boys for ice cream after dinner. When it was time to leave, all I wanted was to stay. More than that, I wanted to cry that this wonderful week was at an end.

One night while I was out on the deck, watching the changes in the sky as it darkened and listening to the sounds of the ocean, I started thinking about the word shalom. How it means not just peace but wholeness. This week was the first time in five years that I felt whole again, like the terrible business of illness and grief and bullies and struggle might finally be in the past. There was even a part of my heart that felt like missing my dad was okay, after all these years, because I could simply imagine him getting right into the surf on a boogie board with the kids, just as if he was there with us. And because he wasn't there, it was my job to go boarding instead. Because I am finally well enough. And because I wasn't afraid.

My comfort level in this sunshiny, beachy environment - normally hellish for me with my pale skin and my less than slender figure - may also have been helped by the fact that I found a swimsuit in which I not only felt comfortable, but downright gorgeous. I would have let anyone look at me in this suit, would have happily posed for the full figured edition of Sports Illustrated. I've rarely felt so pretty in something as revealing. As I said to my sister, you know you're feeling good about your figure when you start judging all the other overweight people in your head. Being down nearly sixty pounds does wonders for one's self-esteem, even with a ways yet to go.

Speaking of the figure wars, my latest fitting for the bridesmaids' dress took place last night. The seamstress is a genius; basically it has been transformed into the bionic garment. While the color, style and design have now conspired to make me consider posting a "wide load" sign on my rear end for the duration of the nuptials, the length, I have to say, is charming - tea-length with a little flounce at the bottom - seriously cute. Moving upwards, however, not so much. This dress is the total opposite of the swimsuit - I am going solo to this wedding because I think it is better to spare those you love. There is no male friend, hetero, gay, or otherwise, that I would force to endure the sight of me in this color. I thought getting a tan would improve matters. It has not. Now my skin looks greenish with an overtone of orange. But the fabric color itself - previously named electric hemorrhoid - has been upgraded, in honor of my family, to Taylor Ham. It is offical. I am the Haminatrix. I am the aformentioned pork roll. Glue some pistachios to it, and I'd be a freaking mortadella.

On a less self-deprecating note, I was fortunate to finish my vacation by attending the Paul McCartney show on Saturday night at CitiField. First of all, the stadium is unreal. I didn't mind Shea so much despite the concrete and the aroma of eau de beerdrinker that pervaded the place. But the new stadium is magnificent. I just hope it stays that way. Laura and I relaxed, after a full day of packing and driving and unpacking and playing with the kids, in a club-like lounge with great music and top-shelf vodka, for about an hour before the concert - it hardly felt like we were in a sports arena, waiting for the show to begin. The show itself afforded me the opportunity to sing, dance, cry, experience ecstasy in a way that I ordinarily do only in temple, and generally geek out to the music I've loved for so long. It's so strange to me how meaning in the music changes over the years. Even songs I don't love, like Helter Skelter, were cathartic in a different way at 39 than they were when I was a scared 11 year old listening to it in Ellen's upstairs bedroom and hearing about the Mansons for the first time. The concert also blew me away just by virtue of the sheer talent - hearing the person who wrote Yesterday and Hey Jude and Band on the Run and Let it Be sing them live, in the same key as they were written all those years ago. I can't even imagine having the talent to have composed some of the greatest music of all time, to be in the same environment with such a great gift. It's an experience I'll always treasure.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Until next summer.

Bridesmaid Revisited

Yeah, so I'm a 39 year old bridesmaid. So what? You wanna fight about it? Because let me tell you, I've got some stories. And not just about the dress you see in the picture. This whole bridesmaid thing started long before you ever knew me. Hell, I've got dresses older than you.

I love my friend Stephanie. She is, bar none, the most mellow and easygoing bride I've ever met (no offense to my many married friends.) I'm honored to serve as one of her bridesmaids because she's a cool girl and a great friend and dozens of other wonderful things that would take me way too long to write about. Sensitive to the various shapes and sizes of her bridesmaids, she graciously allowed us to choose our dresses - all we had to stick to was the color and the fabric.

This did not come as a surprise. In addition to being an awesome powerful woman in her own right, Stephanie is one of the few women I know who is all about confidence-building, the kind of friend who makes you feel not merely like you're a supermodel with a genius IQ and you could achieve anything, but also that you're fine just the way you are, and if you don't have the outer beauty that you'd like (and she definitely fell out of the supermodel with the genius IQ tree) then you're fine just the way you are. Obviously, she has endowed me with so much confidence that I really believed, when I picked out the dress, that I would look pretty much like the girl in the photo above.

Now, those of you who know me also know that this is not the first time I have met my nemesis in the guise of chiffon and tulle. When my sister married in 1987, she chose not only six bridesmaids who were all no taller than 5'4" and weighed no less than 120, but also a dress that can only best be described as Krystle Carrington on crack. A late-eighties model atrocity featuring a bouffant ballet skirt (in WHITE tulle) but also a plunging sweetheart neckline, a short fitted waist and puffed tulle sleeves right out of the Joan Crawford collection. To say I looked like a Green Bay Packer in drag would be a kindness. It was more like a circus production of Swan Lake in which Odette and Odile are danced by Siamese twins. The White Swan and the Black Swan getting together to produce one galumphing, graceless entity: the Fat Swan.

What added significant insult to injury was that the dress only came in a top size of 12. And in those days, I was a 14. Fully at the mercy of my mother and sister, I was dragged to aerobics three days a week, did Jane Fonda's workout on the off days, subsisted on melba toast and celery. But G-d made my rib cage a certain size, and unfortunately, that size was incompatible with the dress my sister chose. Two weeks before the wedding I ended up in a different dress, one that actually fit me and made the most of my 5'10" and, shall we say, delicious figure. The photos are actually quite lovely. (Or so my therapist has told me.)

Fast-forward to this past Sunday, twenty-two years and two weeks later, when I unwrapped the plastic, knowing that this time I'd be safe. Considering what I'd gone through back in the day, I was going to outwit everyone this time -- the diet programs, the gym memberships, the entire bridal-industrial complex. For Stephanie's wedding, I'd ordered the dress three sizes too big. Plus, I was glowing in the knowledge that I'd shed 56 pounds since last September, getting ever closer to that size 14 I used to be. I could hardly wait to see what I'd look like in the slinky scarlet gown on the hanger.

I happened to be at my mom's. So I went into my old room, wiggled out of my (new!) skinny jeans and t-shirt, put on the gown (too big in the waist and hips! yes!), and reached around back for the zip.

Huh.

I went out into the living room. "Mom," I asked, "can you zip this?"

She tried. Valiantly. And although the dress was roomy at the waist, and more than accountable at the hips, once the damn zip got halfway up my back, well, my luck just ran out. Try as one might, there was no way in hell this was getting around my chest. Judging from the issues at hand, there was a good six inches of space between where the zipper was supposed to meet.

Mom came around to survey me from the front. "You're not bringing a date to this wedding, are you?" she asked, as she futzed with the pleats covering my boobs.

"Wasn't planning to," I replied.

"Good," she said, standing back and looking at the dress from head to toe. "Because this dress really does nothing for you."

I went to my room and looked in the mirror. It was the first time I had seen myself in a gown since, well, the All Saints Day Pageant in 1976, where I had been awarded the plum role of Saint Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. I'd worn a pink gown with a baby-blue veil crowned by flowers. I was six, and I'm sure I looked quite cute and holy and sweet. This, on the other hand, was not quite the same sort of religious experience, unless you considered it in terms of a martydom. The color was gorgeous. Just not on me. I looked like something out of Leviticus. And not the good parts, where G-d comes to Sinai and the people Israel experience divine revelation. Nope, I looked like a cross between the skin disease and the placenta and the sacrificial fat of the liver parts. And worst of all, the best description of the combination of my skin tone and the color could only be described as "electric hemorrhoid."

Leave it to me to be unable to see the gorgeous porcelain complexion of a face that has changed both beautifully and radically since losing the multiple chins, the not-too-shabby cleavage, or the fact that I have become literally a nephew lighter in the past ten months, leaving me with a way more proportioned figure and actually, not looking so bad. Instead, all I could focus on was that I had about sixteen yards of pleated chiffon covering my boobs, fourteen yards of pleated chiffon emphasizing my still-not-tiny waist, and a pair of uncovered shoulders that would scare even the most seasoned personal trainer into retirement. But that wasn't the real problem. My real problem was, how the hell was I going to close the gap - literally - in the back?

So I immediately got on Facebook and asked for help. A few people responded and I ended up calling a nice lady recommended by my friend Adrienne. We made an appointment for Tuesday so I got in the car with my ninety yards of Electric Hemorrhoid and headed for the seamstress' office.

Well: she looked at me, looked at the dress, looked at the tag with the size on it, laughed and said, I don't think I can help you. However, once we discussed the fact that she would have all the material from the bottom to work with (the dress has to be hemmed to tea-length), she might be able to work a miracle.

So, again, I humbly submitted to being stripped down to my skivvies, held out my arms for the tape measure (tossed around me like a lasso, may I add) and squinted my eyes shut at the reality of my un-Barbie-esque measurements. Then I put on the dress. The woman pinned and tucked, lifted and pinned again. Really, more pins than I'd ever seen in my life. In locations where I am not really comfortable seeing dozens of pins. I looked in the mirror and realized I'd gone from Saint Elizabeth to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

At that moment, I have to say that I wondered what it would be like to be a small girl, one of those women who can flit through fittings and wear off-the-rack sample sale clothes and never has to worry about the communal dressing room at Loehmanns. I've never been the kind of person to care about that stuff, I've always had a pretty good sense of personal style that improved vastly after I started watching What Not To Wear and learned how to dress the figure I have. And the figure I had 56 pounds ago. But this just seemed, really, about as bad as it could get. A flashback to the awful days in 1987 when I thought I'd never be like those other women, that flock of beautiful swans attending my sister while I hung back in a different dress, feeling like a failure and a freak. After all the weight I'd lost, I'd just started feeling really ok about my body again, like there was more that was good and beautiful about me than horrific and shameful. And now this.

She finally finshed with me, lifted the electric hemorrhoid over my head and said she'd need some time. The upshot is that she has to take it apart, rebuild the back and the zipper, and then make the whole thing again -- the Steve Austin of bridesmaids dresses - thankfully, we have the technology. I asked if there would be enough fabric left over to make a little cape or a shawl. She laughed again, this time quite merrily, at how silly I am to think that there was going to be any leftover material. I thanked her graciously, went back out to my car, immediately called the bridal salon a few doors down from my office and ordered myself a shawl. I had all the information I needed, including the information that I was going to need something to mitigate just how awful I may end up looking in this dress. The conversation went something like this:

Yes, Jasmine Belsoie. The fabric is Tiffany Chiffon. Color? (biting lip) Yes, the color is Peony.

But I'm sure you can guess what I wanted to say.

Next fitting: July 20th.