Lillet And Trey Visit America

Trey and I got back from Maine last night. Really, it wasn't long enough -- although staying in a motel is always fun, sometimes 2 days of solid family isn't exactly restful. Seeing our nieces, however, was fantastic and Maine is pretty and there were enormous crows on the hill behind our motel window and a jolly fat woodchuck romping in the clover.

New York is home to a spectrum of body types from Kate Moss to Big Momma. But in Maine pretty much everyone is just plain FAT. Not zaftig, not bootylicious, not sturdy, not big-boned, not husky, not solid, but sickeningly obese. It was most pronounced when we went to the lake: I saw a man -- several men -- whose bellies distended in such a way they appeared to have some horrible disfiguring disease. When I see that particular kind of massive man gut all I can think of is colon cancer.

We saw people who were so overweight you could tell they were unable to walk properly, were constantly winded, who strained to sit down. I wholeheartedly agree that there is an incredibly wide range of body types and I especially get upset at how women are made to feel inferior for not being a size 2 and that we live in a time where Marilyn Monroe would be considered a prime candidate for Jenny Craig.

But Jenny Craig is part of the problem, as is this massive obesity problem, and that is that NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW HOW TO FUCKING EAT!

Even without the vegetarian thing, Trey and I were dumbstruck at the food options or lack thereof everywhere we went. The first night we went to a steakhouse that our nieces adore, because it has talking animal heads on the wall and an animatronic Christmas tree that tells jokes. It would have been my favorite spot at age 10, for sure! We figured we'd be able to find something on the menu. Usually menus have the commie hippie fag vegetarian dish that is five oily zucchini slices plopped on a serving of Uncle Ben's. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about!

But "finding something on the menu" proved much harder than anticipated. Every single salad had meat and cheese on it. Not the "With grilled chicken add $2.00" option: the meat and cheese were gonna be in that salad NO MATTER WHAT! There was not a single dish that did not have steak, chicken, shrimp or fish, not even the usual cheapskate garden side salad. And when the food came, the entrees came on platters the size of an open magazine. It was crazy! Not to mention the newly disturbing sight of watching my angelic ten year old niece dig into a still bloody slab of prime rib an inch and a half thick the size of her head. Even if you are going to eat meat, no 10 year old should be eating a prime rib the size of her head.

And her mother used to be a head oncology nurse at a major cancer hospital in Manhattan. Go figure.