Fat Girl

The great thing about taking self-portraits is that you can find that one angle where you look best and then snap the shot. All these pictures, taken from your Schokoladenseite as they say in German, end up looking great. "Wow. I'm looking fabulous!" you can tell yourself as you browse through the pictures on your camera.

The problem? Sometimes OTHER people take pictures of you. This happened recently with a good friend of mine who I'm taking the photography class with. We had an Ausflug on Potsdamer Platz where we took lots of pictures to practice white balance among other things. When we showed the shots in class there was one of me, looking like a huge, double-chined heifer with a camera round her neck. This photograph confirmed the fact I prefer to overlook: I have gotten fat.

Yes, having two babies close together will do this to you. There are the women who loose all the extra weight plus some from breast feeding (aka lucky bitches n' hos....)but sadly, I am not one of them. If anything I might even have GAINED weight, but I can't really say for sure because, these days, I'm not going anywhere near a scale.

This is not the first time in my life that I've been overweight. In my early 20s, when my now-ex husband and I still had a long distance relationship, we spent a lot of time eating our way through both countries. I got fat, he didn't. Once, when he came and I was already tipping the scales at 180, I told him I didn't want to eat a carton of Ben and Jerry's with him every night as we had been doing. "Ok. What about every other night?" he said.

Much has happened since those days. My dress size has gone up and down a number of times, and was even down to a size 8 one particularly manic summer. Size 8 to my current size 16. That's an 8 number difference. Meeting somewhere in the middle would be nice.

To console myself, I can at least say I'm not as fat as Molly Luft. This is Molly Luft, aka the fattest whore in Germany.



When I first moved to Berlin she had an after-hours show of public access television. Basically the show was her in a room with a telephone. Other women would call the number on the screen and tell her she was fat and prostitution was gross and she would tell them we whores have rights too. At the end, she always took off her shirt and did a little dance, her huge, pendulous breasts swaying back and forth to the rhythm. I would watch this sometimes, still culture shocked and somewhat depressed, wondering what kind of country I had moved to.

I don't know what old Molly is doing these days. For a while she had an Eckkneipe (=pub for broken down old men)on the corner of my street. Her picture was on the wall outside and inside you could buy her used underwear among other things. Once, I even saw her sitting at the bar, her huge ass hanging over the sides of the stool.


The place eventually went out of business and now the very cool Van Doren has moved in and is already my favorite watering hole.

Will I loose the weight? I hope so. These days I'm feeling pretty determined. Besides, it's not over til this fat lady sings, or at least drops down three dress sizes.