Postcards from the Floor of the Lane Bryant Dressing Room

Excuse #99 for not keeping up with this blog:  I’ve been writhing on the dressing room floor trying to get my Spanx off.

For months.

I have a big event coming up--one that requires a pressed gown and proper undergarments.  It was recommended to me that I invest in a “shaper” to smooth things out. 

I have two statements about “Shapers”:

1.    They are for skinny people who need to hide a cheeseburger when it becomes visible to the outside world while on its way down their small intestine…like a python digesting a rat.   

2.    Shapers on fat people are actually “Shape SHIFTERS” that manipulate and decide all by themselves on a new shape which may be worse than the shape you started with.

Statement 2, of course, applies to me.  I can pack a cheeseburger where you’ll never see it again.

I may have been dreaming when I tried on the stretchy garment, meant for an 11 ½ inch glamour doll, that all my years of being unkind to my figure would magically disappear, Cinderella-like, just for one night. 

My Fairy Godmother must be off “bippity-booing” somewhere else.

Scarlett O’Hara’s Mammie and the suction power of a hundred Dysons couldn’t force me into the shape I imagined.  Ten thousand Chinese Olympic opening ceremony acrobats, all linked together shouting “Pull!” (in Chinese, of course) would, at best, would move things north making me into a double-scoop ice cream cone.

Once I had the girdle-like fabric in place, what happened was the extra flesh, under the pressure of the elastic/spandex/woven-titanium was pushed together, forcing electrons to enter the wrong orbits.  Heat rose from the waistband like subway steam. 

A new shape was created… rock solid, immobile, Manatee-like.  John Travolta made a better looking woman than the one in my dressing room mirror. I tried the dress on over the shape-shifter’s decision for my body type, but I couldn’t get it past the gigantic”Boob-waist-hip” obstacle. 

“I want my old body back,” I wailed inside my head.  I pity the person who might have been electronically monitoring me.  She’s blind now.

I heard a jubilant person in the next room say how great her dress fit now.

Skinny Bitch.