1990sFest: Day Five—"Being nude doesn't make you invisible"

     I'm on vacation this week, so instead we're dipping into some early columns from 1996 and 1997.

     The health club this took place at—the Lakeshore Athletic Club, just north of the Sun-Times—is gone, as are the 401 N. Wabash offices of the paper, of course. The Tribune columnist I refer to, George Lazarus, is also long gone, expiring famously on the Metra, an end that has crossed my mind more than once while commuting on the train. He is famous for complaining, bitterly, of being lampooned in song at the Gridiron Club dinner. Which is also gone.

     Men must feel that being naked makes them invisible. Invisible, or maybe just shrouded in the Cone of Secrecy. That's the only way to explain a phenomenon I've noticed in locker rooms over and over.
     Two guys finish playing racquetball. They clomp over to where I'm getting dressed: alone, silent, pondering what's for dinner.
     After a word or two about the game, they begin talking about their work. They ignore me — a nebbishy guy, fiddling with his necktie — and I of course listen intently.
     And am usually shocked by what they say.
     The most recent time it was a pair of lawyers — I won't reveal the firm, though I could easily read its name, and the lawyers' names, from the business cards they had stuck in their gym bag name tag holders to save themselves the 10 seconds of writing down a name and phone number.
     Lawyer One asks about a certain Chinese colleague. Lawyer Two says the colleague's going back to Beijing. Lawyer One speculates on the reasons why. Lawyer Two mentions he's had the Chinese lawyer over to his house — they played Ping-Pong. Lawyer One muses on the impact that his leaving will have on the firm — it seems he is a rainmaker bringing in business from China. They then discuss their firm's relationship to China and its hopes for the future there.
     My jaw drops open.
     I want to say: You guys are lawyers? Aren't you supposed to be, oh, I don't know, circumspect about this sort of thing? During the O.J. Simpson trial, did Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey shoot their mouths off at their health club? "Good thing O.J. dumped the knife at LAX, eh?" says Cochran, toweling himself. "Sure makes our lives easier," answers Bailey, slapping Vitalis on what hair he's still got.
     I mean, these two guys didn't know me. I could be a lawyer from a rival firm. I felt like saying, "Gone to China, has he? Maybe I'll ring him up and see if he wants to represent us."
     I don't want to implicate only lawyers. Everybody does it. A lot of our competition goes to this same gym. There used to be this columnist — again, I will draw the protective veil around his identity, though heaven knows he doesn't deserve the kindness.
     Every day he would drape himself in a towel and get on the pay phone and begin yabbing to his secretary, going over his schedule — the calls he was returning, the leads he was developing. His voice echoed off the walls like cannon fire.
     I used to listen in — I could hardly do otherwise — hoping for a tip to rush back to our business department. But he never seemed to be working on anything worthwhile.
    Of course, listening in also can have its perils.
     I remember, I had just moved to Los Angeles — a brief, mistaken adventure. Two guys in a club locker room were discussing the fall of a colleague.
     "He lost all his power," said one man, sadly. "I feel bad for him. He had to move out of his house. . . ."
     Geez, I thought. What a ruthless place! I pictured this poor executive, cashiered by brutal corporate infighting, deprived of his position, even booted out of his high-priced residence.
     Then they continued talking, and I realized: he had lost power, as in electricity. Whoops.
     But the lesson is the same — even though you're wearing a towel, you're still in public, and you never know who's at the next locker, listening.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 20, 1997

1990sFest: Day Four—"Love at first byte."

Children Watching Balinese Puppets at the Field Museum of Natural History

  

     While I'm on vacation, let's squint a few decades into the past.    
     Today, one third of recently married couples met online, as opposed to at a bar or social event. That was very different 20 years ago, when meeting online had an air of something unwise, perhaps illicit. Notice the presence of a certain thick yellow piece of technology now entirely absent from our lives.

     There was a great sketch at Second City recently in which a defiant wife is packing her bags to meet her new online lover. She grandly announces that her online name is Lady Crimson, and her new boyfriend is The Weasel.
     "I have to go to him," she tells her boggled husband. "The Weasel is my soulmate."
     The Weasel turns out to be 14 years old. His mother drives him to the motel. But the funniest part is how her husband just can't get over the moronic moniker of his rival, and keeps repeating it, in agonized wonder, while his wife is leaving. "The Weasel!" he says, clutching his head as if it were splitting apart. "The Weasel?!?!?"
     Public service types always focus on the risk the Internet poses to tender and impressionable children. Warnings are always ringing that the kiddies might stumble across some dirty pictures and, I don't know, be scarred for life.
     What about their parents? What about the risk to them? The Internet's online services such as America Online are a tar pit, an attractive nuisance, an inviting trap enticing the lonely and the foolish to embrace their ruin.
     Exhibit A: The ad for Myers Service Inc., "Chicago's Premier Detective Agency," in the 1997 Ameritech Yellow Pages. Like most phone book ads for detective agencies, it has a pleasant Sam Spade ring to it, listing that the company will trace missing people and investigate backgrounds.
     But one service is something never imagined in Raymond Chandler: "On-line Infidelity."
     "We've been getting a lot of business — it's exploding," said Marty Mroz, director of outside investigations at Myers. "We've been noticing that a lot of people have been meeting on these chat lines."
     Of course they are. The Internet is perfect for those inclined to stray. Anyone with a computer and a modem now has a 24-hour honky tonk in their rec room, and many seem unable to resist wandering in.
     "I see it as an increasing problem," said Jeffery M. Leving, a divorce attorney, who is handling cases involving online dalliance. "There are people who are addicted to the Internet."
     Of course there are. For women, it is a chance to troll for men, free of their often-menacing physical presence. For men, it permits the kind of incremental, hair-splitting approach to whatever qualms they might have about cheating on their wives.
     Exhibit B is Howard Stern. Stern, who has made technical fidelity to his wife the core of his shtick, spends the first 50 pages of his most recent best seller rhapsodizing about the joys of online sex.
     "I like this Prodigy chat concept because here's a way to be with new women and not have a guilty conscience afterward," he writes in one of the few quotable passages of Miss America. "In my mind this ain't cheatin'!"
     Legally, he is right. No matter what is done with somebody in another room, it doesn't become a case for lawyers until two people get together.
     "By definition there is no such thing as online infidelity," said Barry C. Zachary, a divorce attorney. "If there is no contact between the two parties, it cannot be adultery."
     But legalities are moot when the crockery starts to fly. Conducting a relationship online is, perhaps, most comparable to exchanging love letters, and while the lack of physical intimacy might keep your spouse from actually tearing you limb from limb, the odds are that he or she will not be happy to learn of your electronic liaison with the anonymous.
     That assumes the affair is kept online. There is always the temptation to move from the virtual to the real.
     "What's happening is they're finding people they're interested in, setting up these romantic interludes," Mroz said. "It's becoming more and more common in the last couple years; this stuff has been catching on. It's kind of scary that people would do this."
     It certainly was scary for the New York woman who had dinner last week at the apartment of a man she met online, only to be — she says — beaten and raped by the man.
     "You have no idea who you're speaking to," Mroz said. "This person can be a complete crazy person. You can think you're talking to a woman who could be a man, it could be a kid. You don't know who you're speaking to."
     Ah, well. Somewhere, aged computer wizards are shaking their heads, thinking back to the days when they were slaving over those burning electrical circuits and exploding tubes, deluding themselves that they were struggling to bring the world an easier way to calculate large prime numbers and figure out the trajectories of cannon shells. Sorry, guys, you were building a sex toy.
     Had they taken a few psychology classes among the physics seminars, they would have seen it coming. Human nature being what it is, we should never be surprised when libido -- licit, illicit and otherwise -- overwhelms technology. Look in the benign, utilitarian phone book that brought this up in the first place. There are 19 full pages of advertising under the heading "Computers" in the 1997 yellow pages. And 27 full pages of ads for escort services. Draw your own conclusions.

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 22, 1997

1990sFest: Day Three—Stars shine at Art Institute soiree

     While I'm on vacation, I'm setting the Time Machine for the late 1990s.
     This isn't a column, but a news story, helping out with our coverage of the 1996 Democratic National Convention. I wasn't invited; Richard Roeper helped me crash the party. The place was packed, and when John F. Kennedy Jr. entered the room, the mob pressed toward him. I wheeled around and headed in the opposite direction, but a young woman caught my arm and asked to be introduced to JFK Jr. I did so, and used to have a photo of us shaking hands, but his face in profile, and mine, provided such a stark contrast I gave the photo away to the young woman, who was also in it. 

     Others were there who didn't make the story—Mike Royko, grumbling about phonies. For years I thought of the evening as the night I met Bill Zehme, which tells you where the nonpareil Esquire writer stood in my esteem.

    The only other thing I can recall is that this story wasn't written, but dictated over a payphone I had managed to wrest away from someone. 

     An A-list group of celebrities — including Norman Mailer, Kevin Costner and Aretha Franklin — joined thousands of well-connected people for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s hot-ticket George magazine party Tuesday.  

August 1996 edition of George magazine

     

     Nibbling crudites and sipping wine, the guests packed the Art Institute courtyard and rubbernecked to catch a view of celebrities ranging from Chastity Bono to Neil Hartigan.
     Kennedy worked his way through the crowd — flanked by security guards — and praised the party's setting. "I can't think of a better place to have a party than in this beautiful museum," he said. "I'm coming back tomorrow when it's open."
     The party, which featured the music of the rock band Poe, was to promote Kennedy's political magazine, which he started last year.
     Kennedy wore a navy blue double-breasted suit. As he spoke, Joe Silverberg, co-owner of Bigsby & Kruthers, adjusted the host's white pocket square, which was not filling the pocket properly.
     "Why not? What else am I going to do? He's beautiful," said Silverberg, adding that he often pulls stray threads off of people's suits in pursuit of sartorial excellence.
     Across the courtyard, which was minimally decorated, Mailer was talking about Hillary Rodham Clinton. "I have nothing against strong women," he said. All of his six wives were strong women, the novelist added.
     While Aretha Franklin munched on an hors d'oeuvre, Kevin Costner walked up and said modestly, "My name is Kevin and I'm a big fan of yours."
     A waiter reported that the celebrities were entering the party through the kitchen. Some dawdled to sample the food there, he said, including Franklin.
     Christine Gidwitz said, "For Chicago, this is excellent people-watching."
     Among those being watched were Billy Baldwin, Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), three Chrises — Lawford, Rock and Zorich — Sugar Rautbord, William Kennedy Smith, Janet Davies, Eunice Shriver, Eleanor Mondale, Jerry Springer and Juanita Jordan, who reported that Michael was in Los Angeles.
     TV personality Bob Sirott supplied some perspective. "This is supposed to be the most exclusive ticket to get," he said. "So how come everyone I know is here?"

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 28, 1996

1990sFest: Day Two—"Neighborly thing to do is assume the worst"

19th century French mugshot (MMA)

     I'm on vacation. While I'm off, please enjoy this nugget of the 1990s.

     Talk about your unnecessary and wasteful government meddling. Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan is appealing a judge's overturning of Illinois' community notification law — one of those laws modeled after New York state's "Megan's Law," requiring that local residents be informed when convicted sex offenders move into their neighborhoods.
     Is that really necessary? You mean there are people who don't just automatically assume that their neighbors are criminals and perverts? Who smile and greet them over the hedges without wondering what sort of nightmare atrocities they are secretly perpetrating behind their ghastly floral-print curtains? Who don't glance into their open garages, searching for pentagrams and manacles and drums of acid?
     I don't believe it.
     For my part, I am always on constant alert for criminal activity on the part of my neighbors, without any prompting from governmental authorities. In fact, I wish they would notify me about the neighbors who definitely aren't criminals, so I could stop worrying about them.
     As it is, the slightest sound from next door and I am ready to snap into action.
     "Honey, call DCFS!" I yell, leaping from my easy chair and waving my index finger. "The Schmendersons are abusing their kids again."
     "The Schmendersons don't have any kids," my wife replies, wearily.
     "Aha! So you've fallen for their little scheme," I say, eyes glittering. "That's just what they want you to think, isn't it? The kids are chained in the basement, weaving baskets, waiting for us to rescue them."   

Metropolian Museum of Art

     "The Schmendersons don't have a basement," my wife says. "We've been through this."
     "Aha! So you've fallen for . . ." I begin, but she cuts me off with a harsh look.
     In addition to being suspicious by nature, I can't stand the thought of being caught unaware. I've seen too many stories where, the day after the maniac is brought into the police station, screeching and frothing in a cage, the boob neighbors are trotted out blinking before the bank of news cameras.
     "Gee, he seemed so normal," they gibber. "Yup, I heard those screams and thuds and struggling sounds in the middle of the night, and something that sounded like a radial saw. But I just thought it was the television."
     I can see the headline: "Schmenderson House of Horror" with my picture low on the page: eyes wide, mouth agape, tie under my ear, and the caption, "Neighbor: 'I suspected nothing.'"        

     This must be avoided. Careful monitoring of one's neighbors, after all, is one of the stoutest corner posts of civilization.
     That's why so many wackos come out of farm country and the empty expanse of the Great Plains. They are unobserved, left to their own devices, and they know it. If Ted Kaczynski had lived here, not in rural Montana, people up and down his street would have turned him in as a Unabomber suspect years ago.
      "I happened to be walking my dog in the breezeway next to his garage," the hero would report. "And I heard a funny noise. So I stacked some boxes together and stood on them so I could look through the transom. And sure enough, there was Ted, at his workbench, filing away at something that looked kinda like the trigger mechanism for a bomb. So I went through his garbage, and there was a receipt for . . ."

   Constant vigilance, after all, is what makes for a safe society. We are always being tormented with the statistics from crime-free Japan, where there are about 12 murders a year and where if you drop your wallet on the street good samaritans will wrestle each other to see who gets the honor of returning it to you, elaborately gift-wrapped. What we aren't told about is the intense effort required to maintain that level of safety. When my brother moved to Tokyo, he didn't know the proper way to wrap his garbage when he threw it away. He discovered the proper way, however, after his neighbors formally complained to his boss, who then called him on the carpet and told him to get with the program.
     Just this year, our neighbors to the west built a nine-foot wooden fence between our properties, without so much as a "boo" to us beforehand. "You think they are going to top it off with searchlights and concertina wire?" I asked my wife, as we watched the monstrosity going up like worried East Germans monitoring construction of the Berlin Wall. It was my impression that the wall was about two feet over code, and we briefly considered turning them in to the city.
     But that seemed so unneighborly. You don't want to antagonize people — you never know who you're dealing with. Psychotics are everywhere, waiting to explode at the slightest provocation.
     And besides, I figure the wall protects us from them as much as it protects them from us. And a good thing, too. I've had my doubts about them. They are quiet people. They keep to themselves. That's always a sure sign of trouble.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 12, 1996

1990sFest: Day One—"Nose for news nets a piercing interview"

     I'm on vacation. As much as part of me wants to leave this space blank for the next week, to show that I can, enough people start their days here that I don't want to disappoint anybody.

    I don't know when I'll be able to vet comments and, alas, can't leave them unmonitored. Please be patient and I'll get them up as soon as possible. 

    This week marks my 22nd year as a columnist at the Sun-Times, and I thought I would reach back to the first couple years, to the foreign shore of the second half of the 1990s, and revisit some chestnuts from the day. I've tried to pick posts that hold their interest, such as this foray into kink.  Notice the rather prescient observation about Dennis Rodman. At the time he was considered a freak; now half the players in the NBA have body art very much like his.

     Some readers may doubt my motives in attending a lecture entitled "Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power." Honestly, I wasn't out for a thrill.
     I had a question in mind. I wanted to know something. I figured that Valerie Steele, a New York cultural historian speaking on that topic last week at the School of the Art Institute, just might be able to answer it.
     I hoped to have nose jewelry explained to me. I live in a neighborhood where, more and more, young people parade about with metallic ornaments dangling from their nostrils.
     Nasal decorations mystify and disturb me—not simply because I find them ugly. But because of my reaction. No matter how many times I've seen them, my brain still goes through the same three-step cognition process: 1) Hey, that girl has a booger hanging out of her nose; 2) No, wait, it's metallic; c) Oh, it's a nose bauble.
     I worry this is a sign of old age—that, at 35, my mind has seized up, and is no longer nimble enough to accept such an innocuous change. Why should a gold sphere worn at the nostril be viewed as any less attractive than one worn in the ear lobe? They're big in India. Why can't I accustom myself to what has to be, at least for some, a fetching fashion?
     Steele didn't say much about nose baubles. She focused instead on the spike heels, leather outfits and rubber unmentionables standard to the fetish underworld, showing how, via high fashion and icons such as Madonna, the marginal has quickly filtered into the mainstream.
 

Diana Rigg as Emma Peel

   "For the past 30 years, playful incorporation of fetishism into popular culture has been a growing trend," said Steele.
     She traced the bondage-at-Bloomingdales phenomenon to Diana Rigg's Emma Peel in the 1960s TV show "The Avengers." Mrs. Peel was "crucial" to the emergence of fetishism into pop culture, Dr. Steele said, showing how Peel's skintight cat suit was taken from an English bondage uniform. "The television producers thought the full-face mask was too kinky, so they lopped that off," Steele added.
     I imagine Steele's lecture 20 years from now will include a slide of Dennis Rodman, in full tattoo and regalia, along with an explanation of how Rodman was a pioneer of the body decoration that no self-respecting member of the class of '16 will be without. Rodman is an amazing figure, when you consider how unimaginable he would be in professional sport even 10 years ago. What today strikes us as weirdness might someday be seen as vision and guts.
     Steele showed a slide of a turn-of-the-century Viennese fetish shoe whose 11-inch heel was not meant for walking, but for . . . well, for something else. She explained how the important thing was not so much the shoe, itself, but the meaning given to the shoe.
     "A fetish is a story masquerading as an object," she said. "This shoe symbolizes a story, a fantasy."
     Steele didn't intend it, but I think her comment also explains the fantastic prices being paid for the flotsam and jetsam of Camelot at the Jackie Onassis auction in New York. Both are using an object to reach toward an unattainable fantasy.
     Afterward, I asked Steele if she saw a connection.
     "It's not a sexual fetish but it is a fetish," she said. "Clearly, the overvaluation and ritualization of objects that evoke the Kennedys. They touched these things. He sat on that chair. He used that golf club. It's like a relic of the saints."
     About 75 people attended the lecture, mostly students from Gillion Skellenger-Carrara's class, "The Art of 20th Century Dress." Among them was Rachel Parker, who sported six piercings in each ear, two nostril posts, two nostril rings, a chin ball, a tongue barbell, pierced nipples, two tattoos and a few ritual scarifications, plus long hair dyed a vibrant orange and green.
     Here, I thought, is the person to explain nose decoration to me, and indeed she was astoundingly candid, pulling down the front of her black sweater to show off the scarification on her left breast, which she administered herself with a razor.
     "I know I won't regret anything I've done," said Parker, 21. She said that while she started scarring herself at 14 as "a way to hurt myself, an escape," now she has been decorating her body for so long that it has become part of her identity. "It's not like I have a choice. This is the way I am."
     Ironically, Parker does not approve of nose festoonery, nor pierced belly buttons, nor any popular embrace of the adornments that set her apart. She sees it as an assault on her dignity by upstarts.
     "I find it annoying," she said. "It's a trend. Trends fade and go away, and I'll have a really big party when that happens. It can't go on much longer."
     I hope not. I walked away thinking how odd it is, that both of us -- this young girl with the pale blue eyes, pretty under all that metalwork, and myself, 35, unpierced, untattooed but plenty bewildered -- can't wait for society to proceed in exactly the same direction.       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 1996

Pritzker joins scary bogeymen Capone, Blago and Madigan

     The Bulls played Golden State Wednesday night. A good game, where what is supposed to be a building-year, hope-for-a-top-draft-pick-and-better-days team gave the world champions a run for their money, particularly that flurry at the end of the first quarter, putting the good guys ahead, 40-38.
     For a moment, victory seemed possible.
     But doing well for a spell is not the same as winning. Not only did my wife and I have to sit through the painful third quarter Bulls meltdown, but the first two of what will be endless reiterations of a black and white Bruce Rauner commercial casting J.B. Pritzker as some kind of nefarious underworld figure, part Al Capone, part Tony Accardo, caught in an FBI wiretap conspiring online with incarcerated felon Rod Blagojevich.The ad is a masterpiece of the dark arts. Soon downstaters will be muttering "Pritzker" as the embodiment of all that is sleazy, the way they invoke the name "Madigan" with a shudder of disgust, as if he sat at the right hand of Satan, controlling all (which, alas, is not far from the truth).
     I'm a naif when it comes to politics. The whole process confuses me. I can't offer the foggiest guess why Bruce Rauner would run for office again. His plan was to become the Illinois Scott Walker — a beloved and successful champion of the triumphant right, sticking it to those union bosses, opening the state to 21st century thread factories. But instead, after three years spinning his wheels in a ditch, he's our C. Montgomery Burns, enemy of children and the handicapped, the least popular man to call himself "governor" since Herod.
     The Democratic candidates, well, what can I say that isn't obvious? J.B. Pritzker, having cannily birthed himself to a family of vast fortune, has spent $42 million toward attaining what would be, in essence, the most expensive internship ever.

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Flashback, 2003: "On the next Treadmill out of Fatville"

From "Janine" by Clarity Haynes (National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

     You never know which column is going to resonate in someone's life. Last week I got an email from a reader, Brian Sirois:

I’m writing my bio for a new website and I’d like to include a link to the article you wrote on Jan 5, 2003 entitled “This year I’m on the Next Treadmill out of Fatville”…That article, which still hangs on my fridge, served as inspiration to turn my own health around. So much so, that 10 years later I switched careers and became a fitness instructor. I stopped chasing big paychecks and started chasing my new-found passion for fitness and helping others...Is it possible to include a link?

     As it turned out, it wasn't. The paper's archive isn't online, for reasons mysterious. Not only is it not online, but whatever librarians we had at the time never migrated it to Nexis. So it is utterly gone. I might have it in a paper file somewhere in the basement...
      Before I went down to look, I asked Brian if he'd scan the column on his fridge and send it to me. He did, and I typed it in—I try to be a full-service columnist.
     I was struck by the candor of the thing. Not a lot of pulling punches. The diet didn't work in 2003. Or 2004. In 2005 I would stop drinking, which helps a lot when it comes to dieting. But even then I needed to be diagnosed with sleep apnea before I shed 30 pounds in 2009 and kept it off in the eight years since. Nothing like being unable to breath at night to serve as an inspiration.
     Anyway, here is the column that Brian wanted to link to on his site. I hope it continues to be inspiring to people. It contains some blunt assessments on fat that might be considered fat-shaming, today, but wasn't then. Nor do I consider it so now—a person is entitled to his own perspective on the desirability of being obese—and if you believe differently, well, that's what the comments section is for.


     No sooner had I taken off my coat, pulled up the Venetian blinds, settled in front of my desk and began wondering what to do first to start off this brave new year of 2003 then the phone rang.
     It was a magazine reporter and he had a question: Aren't New Year's resolutions a joke? This whole idea of arbitrary beginnings and fresh starts: Isn't it somehow ridiculous. There was a smile in his voice.
     This is what's called in the profession "trolling the bait." It was an invitation to me to lean back in my chair, turn one palm toward the ceiling and craft a witty agreement, mocking all those painfully sincere vows, all those dopes who believe—tee hee!—who really believe that, with a click of the calendar and a gust of will, they can suddenly become the sort of person they aren't now and probably never have been, but would like to be. To his surprise, and mine, I didn't bite.
     "Actually," I said, "I take this entire New Year, new leaf thing pretty seriously. I diet. I go on the wagon and try to pull myself together. Sorry."
     We shifted to another subject—he wasn't interested in my disagreement; you don't tend to include counter-arguments in that sort of story.
     After I hung up, I was struck by my seriousness this year. I have to be. Never slim to begin with, 2002 was, as Queen Elizabeth would say, my annus horribilis,which is not Latin for my gigantic ass, but the only thing to call a year when you—OK, me—suddenly gain 20 pounds.
     Well, not suddenly. It only seemed that way. One moment I was cruising along near 200, as I had been for years, and suddenly I was 224.
     At least I'm not alone. As I bought a scale last week and learned the awful truth, a men's athletic magazine listed the fattest cities in America. There was Chicago, No. 2, right after Houston, of all places.
     The general media impulse was to milk the Chicago, City of Broad Backsides news for yucks. Red Streak, the training wheels version of this paper, wrote a mocking—albeit creative—front-page article taking a scrappy "wait-till-next-year" view, with weight-gaining tips and taunts for Houston. The headline was, "Hey, Chicago, feed your face."
     Not me. I took the arrival of the New Year as an unexpected rescue rope, tossed to me by the same indifferent society that sells Krispy Kremes and Sam Adams beer. I'm getting off this bus even if I have to eat less and exercise to do it (there is a third vital element, often forgotten, that I'm keeping in mind: Eat less and exercise over a protracted period).
     "Hey, Chicago, feed your face." That was written by a thin person. A fat person knows that fatness is a personal tragedy. It is ugly, unhealthful and a personal shame that you only need pass a reflective surface to have pop up, unexpectedly, to wave and chirp, "Hey, remember me?"
     This may sound harsh, particularly in a nation (and city) growing fatter by the minute. I am aware that there are some people, many people, who have been so fat for so long and tried so hard to do something about it that, like longtime residents of Milwaukee, they finally sighed and gave up and told themselves that, heck, this isn't so bad. Maybe the problem isn't them. Maybe they're beautiful. Maybe the problem is a crass and craven society that adores thinness above all.
     That might make you feel better, just as a pack of Sno-Balls might make you feel better, but that doesn't make it so. It wasn't a crass and craven society that left me gasping for breath after racing my boys around the house a few times. That's fat, and I wouldn't even have the gumption to admit it in the newspaper if it wasn't coming off, this year, and staying off forever. I may sound foolishly certain, but foolish certainty is where I'm putting my chips down and keep them.
     That's the beauty of resolutions and a new year. It forces you to pause and look at yourself—rather like buying slacks, really. It hands you an opportunity to shuck off your old life and try to be different.
     It worked for me last year. I was discipline itself, for the month of January, lost 13 pounds, and was so pleased with myself that, mistaking progress for success, I dropped my guard and shot back up and more.
     That's what fatness is. It's dropping your guard, a guard that, sadly, because of 100,000 years of genetics trained to jump through the hoops of austerity, has to be kept up by a big portion of the population.
     Yes, at one level, the magazine reporter is absolutely right—the idea of a new start is somewhat delusional. I am the same weak vessel today that I was Tuesday night, guzzling Moet & Chandon and gobbling little hot dogs wrapped in dough. I did not, as I told myself, setting down the champagne at the stroke of midnight, morph into an iron-willed creature of self-discipline and clean living.
     But I wanted to. I don't know about you, but I get so tired of myself. (Maybe you get tired of me , too—I get letters—but at least you can turn the page. Me, I'm stuck). I'm tired of being lardboy. Of wondering as I pause to drive my hand up to the wrist in one of the bowls of candy that my colleagues try to keep filled on their desks, despite my presence, whether they notice me stopping by to load up. Of course they do. Bear that in mind, if the New Year isn't inspiration enough, to those of us who need to lose 40 or 60 pounds, remember this: They notice. Everybody notices. The muu-muu is not slimming. Your wife does indeed mind. You're fat. Deal with it. If I can do it, anyone can.