A woman stands in a blank purgatorial room, dressed smartly. Her face is a taut Botox mask. She brims with cheerful condescension, compounded by speaking to Beddy directly.
“Are you tired of unsightly body fat?”
The camera zooms closer.
“Afraid to put on that bikini come summertime?”
“Are you paying a mint for clothes to accommodate your fluctuating weight?”
Closer still.
“You’ve tried everything, with no success. It’s all right. I don’t blame you. Yo-yo diets are dangerous in the long-term. Exercise is strenuous, and who has time? Finally, a solution that actually works: Corpulenz. Brought to you by the scientists at the Obesity Research Center. These scientists discovered that, over time, body fat builds over our midsection, on top of the muscle tissue.”
She throws out her hands.
“Look what happens when I’m exposed to poor diet.”
CGI effects kick in and she balloons with an audible shhhummp.
“Add to that stress at work.”
Shhump. She doesn’t look like a normal obese person at all, but like she’s swallowed an innertube.
“Having kids,”
Shhhhummmp, stttreetttch.
“Even lack of sleep is believed to cause weight gain.”
Shhummmp – POP. Buttons are propelled from her conservative First Lady dress in exaggeratory slo-mo.
“That’s where Corpulenz comes in.”
A translucent indigo pill the size of her skull floats down from the top of the screen. It ruptures, and out fly fat-devouring medicine graphics like locusts, shrinking her ridiculous torso, sealing the buttons back into place.
“Ahhhhh. Much better.”
She smoothes out her dress.
“Corpulenz is clinically proven to reduce up to 90% of excess body fat and weight, or your money back. Now that’s the kind of victory over your body you were looking for, right?”
Her dress unzips down the back by its own volition and crumples to the floor, revealing a candystriped two-piece bikini. She kicks the dress away.
“Right.”
Beddy switches off the TV. Picks a magazine from the haystack , where somewhere underneath lay a coffee table. Ma is responsible for researching and ordering all the feminine or feminized paraphernalia purchased for Super Duper – the make-up, perfume, tampons, lotions, what have you. Whatever is new and exalted her manager Sal must stock.
She’s grabbed “Celebrities Do It Too!”, a monthly anthology of clandestine photos of celebrities doing banal things. The shouted captions clarify what the celebrities are doing that humanizes them.
“They try to avoid panhandlers!”
“They check their breath with their hand!”
“They squeeze cantaloupes to test ripeness!”
“They scream at their kids!”
“They come out of outhouses looking sheepish!”
She tosses the magazine back onto the stack. Grabs another.
“Gutsy,” dedicated to the famous women brave enough to be photographed without makeup.
Back onto the stack. Another back in her hands. She reads and chugs OJ.