by Guy Branum
And the thing Tracy is good at is dancing. Her skill is her body. Fat people are told we are supposed to be obsessed with our bodies but never take pleasure in them. Our bodies are supposed to be enemies we’re calculating against. Not Tracy. Her body is a source of power and pleasure. The bigots at The Corny Collins Show want to hate her for her poverty and her weight, but once Tracy starts to Madison, they have to admit that girl’s the best.
It’s also significant that the conflict of Hairspray does not, in any significant way, rest on Tracy’s fatness. This isn’t a story of a lonely girl longing for a boy who doesn’t notice her thick body, and it’s not about a sad girl who longs to dance on TV with the thin beautifuls. No, she just wants to be on The Corny Collins Show and impress people with her dancing, and she achieves it pretty quickly. (The main conflict, in fact, centers on the segregation perpetuated by the show she’s on.) The movie isn’t about Tracy’s fight for her inclusion. Rather, it’s about how her inclusion is marginal and conditional as long as others are being excluded.
I’ve always been a very good dancer. I know this isn’t something you’re supposed to say about yourself, but you don’t know me, and it’s true. People frequently tell me this, and when they do, it always sounds like they think I don’t know or maybe have never heard it before. That’s because they’re surprised. They don’t realize what they’re implying, but it’s that they don’t think a body this large is supposed to be fun.
I’m not good at loving my body. In truth, my body and I have a stormy relationship. It’s always growing and shrinking and not fitting into places, and I get mad at it and feel ashamed. Several times I’ve marshaled the resources of my life to losing weight. I make it a priority, I eat only lean meats and vegetables, I work out multiple times a day. I lose weight, but I’m still fat. I’m still too fat to be human, and my efforts don’t exactly add up to loving my body.
I’m not good at believing I’m attractive. I’m not good at making space for physical recreation in my life. I want very deeply to emphasize that my relationship to my body and/or my fatness are not fixed or anywhere close to being healthy. What I want you to know is that I’m a very. good. dancer.
In so many ways, I haven’t been there for my body along the way, but it’s always been there for me. Turn on the music, and it knows what to do. Though I played sports in high school, that was never natural to me, and any skill I had was me just being very, very large and strong.13 The only thing that my brain and body have been able to collaborate on effortlessly is knowing where to put my feet when a Curtis Mayfield song is playing. But it’s what I’ve got, so I’m going to be proud of it.
People will continue to look at me and tell me that I’m doing it wrong. They’re going to talk down to me about nutrition and exercise. They’re going to treat me like a baby who cannot manage his desires. They’re going to expect that inherent in my fatness is a lack of agency and capability. They’re going to tell me I’m doing myself a disservice by not waging war on the 40 percent of my body mass that isn’t lean. I am always, on some level, going to think they’re right.
But I will also love my body. I’m going to have fun with it. And I’m going to dance. A lot.
* * *
1. Rob Reiner in Sleepless in Seattle, Rosie O’Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle.
2. John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rosie O’Donnell in A League of Their Own.
3. Sam Tarly in Game of Thrones, Rosie O’Donnell in Another Stakeout.
4. Wayne Knight in Jurassic Park, Rosie O’Donnell in Exit to Eden.
5. Because, of course, women aren’t human beings, but prizes to be won.
6. Belushi in Animal House, Mo’Nique in Precious, Fat Bastard, take your pick.
7. Like the delightful Debra DiGiovanni.
8. You know, like Lindy West.
9. In the fashion of Ms. Oprah Winfrey.
10. Plus, one of the methods for acquiring crack most commonly referenced in popular culture is performing fellatio on strangers, an activity at which I have proven competency.
11. And the film adaptation of the stage adaptation, and the live television adaptation of the film adaptation of the stage adaptation. I hope John Waters bought a boat or something.
12. I have never seen The Poseidon Adventure, so I cannot comment on Shelley Winters as a fat lady who is a good swimmer. I don’t think she’s a protagonist, so I’m going to stick by this “Tracy Turnblad is the best” stance.
13. Also, I’m super-strong. Why is this never a thing we can attribute to fat people?
UNDEFENDED BORDER
I HAVE A SISTER, Lori. You have probably noticed sidelong references to her in the book thus far, so you’re probably wondering why I have not discussed her in great detail. The answer is that it is exceedingly difficult to discuss her. That is not to say Lori isn’t much discussed. She is a topic people love, and she is a person who loves to be a topic. Every time I start with a new therapist, there comes a point about two or three sessions in when he or she begins asking questions about Lori. Probing. The questions stop being about me entirely, as we spend twenty to ninety minutes (divided over multiple sessions) discussing just Lori and her dynamics. The therapist, who has never actually met Lori, then lands on an opinion. In most cases, that opinion speculates “untreated borderline personality disorder.”
That is these therapists’ opinion. If Lori threatens to sue me over this book, and she will, I can provide the names and addresses of the people who expressed those opinions, making it clear that my statements are not slanderous. Lori will not hire a lawyer, but she will threaten to.
So, the question stands for me: Do I avoid talking about this person who is a quarter of my nuclear family, who was a significant presence in my life from birth, who in many ways shaped my identity, out of fear of how she will react? It’s not a new question for me. All of my life, I have been forced to base a lot of decisions on how Lori will react. Thus, instead of recounting stories and incidents that shape my understanding of Lori from an early age, I must provide you with the information about Lori that gives her the least grounds to threaten to sue over.
Here are facts we have about Lori, facts that are on public record or are widely agreed to by witnesses:
In her early twenties, Lori stole our mother’s wedding ring and pawned it, she said, for money to buy fast food.
In her mid-twenties, Lori embezzled from a bank she was working for. She was convicted and served house arrest.
In her later twenties, Lori embezzled from another employer and served a sentence in a federal prison.
In her early thirties, Lori left her three-year-old daughter with our parents and has no regular contact with the child nor provides any meaningful support for her.
That’s not my story of having a sister, but when Lori is your sister, you don’t get to have a story. You get to be part of her story.
I don’t know how true this was when I was young. Lori, five years older, seemed like the coolest, most glamorous person I knew. She had long hair she got to brush. She had dance costumes. She went to school. For the first five years of my life, we slept in a bed together, and those childhood memories of her telling me stories or singing to me are some of the happiest times I can remember.
But around that time, when I was four or five, I started to see that Lori would sell me out for any advantage, that she could manipulate our parents or play them against each other to meet her whims. I knew if we got the same toy, she would immediately break mine. If I spoke, she would interrupt. At the time, in context, we all told the story that it was simply sibling rivalry. At what point does the narcissism and cruelty of childhood stop being adorable and start being a possible symptom of a mental disorder?
I cannot answer this question. I don’t understand Lori, despite four decades of attempts. Seeking to understand Lori is a black hole that sucks up everything around it. I’m tired of that. It meant that through much of my life in my family
, I didn’t get to have a story. This led me to an obsession with trying to think about the people, places, and things we don’t think about.
Instead of writing a chapter about Lori, I am going to write a chapter about why I love the nation of Canada. But first I have to tell you the story of our meet-cute.
M, A Love Story
There was a time before the Internet when all knowledge was happened upon. If you needed to know something, you had to find a book, the right book, that happened to have the thing you wanted to know. If you wanted a book, you had to go to a library or a bookstore, and they would have books, but just the books they had. There was no efficiency, there was no search capacity,1 there was simply happenstance. I’m basically saying all human culture was a messy junk drawer full of things people needed but could not find until Ask Jeeves debuted in 1996 and started organizing things.
I know that this isn’t true, but it was mostly true.
Back in that world, research skills were important. Research skills were the ability to be your own Wikipedia, to be the engine of your own search, to use the books that fate had been kind enough to bring into your life to obtain the information you needed.
Luckily, I lived in a family where the very sound of my voice would fill one member of the family with a deep need to destroy any happiness I might have. If I expressed an opinion, she would find a way to use it to remind our father what an inadequate boy I was. If I expressed a desire, she would find a way to thwart it. The one place where she could not catch me was in a book. If I was quietly in a corner reading, Lori wouldn’t notice me, my dad wouldn’t notice me, and I could have my liberty. Most of my mid-childhood years were spent dick-deep in a book, and the books that showed you your way around other books, reference books, those were the best. They weren’t fun, they weren’t full of goblins and kings like my fantasy books, but they made me feel like I had access to the information that sophisticated people use to rule the world.2
But in the process, sometimes you obtained information you did not need. These were the most delicious of cases.
In my tenth year, I was given the task of doing a report on a state. This was a very conventional assignment among school-going children of the time. You got assigned a state, you found an encyclopedia, you transcribed some facts onto some wide-ruled paper, you made sure everything was spelled correctly, you put your full name and today’s date in the top right-hand corner, you turned it in. Boom. Success in the form of a tiny gold star.
When states were being allocated in class, I selected Massachusetts. I did this because fancy people were from there. I had been to the west of the United States, and frankly, I’d had enough of it. Many kids chose states that they’d been to or in which they had relatives. I wanted none of this. I wanted greener, more sophisticated pastures. I wanted the closest you can get to England on this continent: New England.
Everything went fine for most of the run of this process. I extracted information from our trusty 1980 World Book Encyclopedia about cranberry production, the Berkshires, John Quincy Adams’s birth in Braintree, the statewide love of cream-based clam chowder, and typed them on an Apple IIe computer. I followed orders and did what I was supposed to do.
But I am messy. I have always been and will always be messy. At all times it seems a little bit like I have barbecue sauce on my hands. I spill stuff, I lose stuff. My shoes disappear constantly. Chaos emanates from my flesh as though I were Roseanne’s Twitter account itself.3 So I, of course, didn’t just extract information about Massachusetts and carry on upon my way.
You see, the entry for Massachusetts in the 1980 World Book Encyclopedia happens to be located in the M volume. The M encyclopedia and I were, in my tenth year, in the midst of a very real romance. See, the M encyclopedia is a meaty tome that also included the entry for mythology. The 1980 World Book Encyclopedia entry for “Mythology” was, in 1986, one of my favorite places to be on the planet. I would lovingly flip through those glossy pages, reading and rereading the volumes of expatiation on Greek and Roman deities, the half-page on Norse mythology, and the paragraph or so on the remaining five inhabited continents. It was very hard to learn about people or gods who weren’t white from reference books in 1986.
The point is, I was spending a lot of time with the M encyclopedia. We worked together, we played together, I really thought it might be “the one.”
As in any relationship, you experiment. You start to get bored with your routines and try some stuff that pushes boundaries. What I’m saying is I started exploring the other parts of the M encyclopedia. J. P. Morgan, Monaco, Mary I of England. But my eyes were always most drawn to those entries that the World Book graphic designers of 1980 had decided to give special treatment. Elevating them from the unimportant stuff with lots of facts-in-brief inserts and graphs. States. Presidents. Countries larger than Monaco. Let me get all up in that infographic, son.
You’ll understand my surprise, confusion, and allure when I came upon a state entry for a state that did. not. exist.
It looked just like the entry for every other state, your Massachusetts, your Maryland, your Montana, all of which I’d read repeatedly. Its name, however, was something I’d never heard of. I asked my mom, who knew most things except what started World War I. But she had no idea what Manitoba was. To this day, few Americans do.
This was around the age when I’d also fallen in love with fantasy novels. I’d had a record-book (don’t ask) version of The Hobbit, then seen the Ralph Bakshi film, then read the actual book, and had a great time with all of them. They’d made clear that books with fake maps and vaguely unreal history were a good time.
The World Book Encyclopedia article on Manitoba had all of this. I assumed dragons, wizards, and a spunky princess with lavender eyes and a family history of sorcery were going to be around any corner. I was wrong. All I found were a line drawing of children sledding and a discussion of controversial provincial language-education policies in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t lavender eyes, but it was weird, so I kept going.
Eventually, I figured out that Manitoba was part of Canada, a thing I’d heard of. The things I knew about Canada were:
1. It was on top of America, and
2. They spoke French there.
I know this because I once asked the president of the PTA if schools near the Canadian border had bilingual aides in their classes who spoke French the way we had aides who spoke Spanish and Punjabi. She very patiently outlined the requirements of the California Educational Code to qualify for bilingual educational aides (ten or more students in the same age range per school). She said she did not know what the requirements were in states that bordered Canada, but they were probably similar. Throughout my childhood, this was all I was looking for: a person to calmly answer my questions with a synopsis of state legal codes. I remember it clearly and fondly. Mary Henson, PTA president, you are an American hero.
But the Manitoba encyclopedia entry shifted my understanding of Canada. It was a place—an entirely different place. I knew there were other countries, France, Mexico, India. Those were places full of history and other cultures. By that I mean they were hats that animatronic dolls wore on “It’s a Small World.” They were also different biomes, that’s very important in countries. When you’re ten, you don’t really understand why people would have a different country if it didn’t have a jungle or a desert. Those places are cool and show up in Indiana Jones movies. People tell you about those places. But no one is telling you jack shit about Canada. And if you’ve learned anything from this book thus far, it’s that my only childhood gesture of rebellion was a deep desire to learn the things the world told me I did not need to know. We had good times together, the M encyclopedia and I, but our affair was over. I had found a new love, full of tar sands and mystery.
The True North, Proud and Free
Margaret Atwood, Canada’s greatest living author,4 once described the U.S.-Canadian border as the world’s longest undefended one-way mirror. Our nat
ions share a language and a continent and—we, as Americans, would like to assert—a culture. We will make jokes about the tiny differences, the ways they pronounce “drama,” “about,” or, most egregiously, “pasta,”5 but we do not give them the dignity of imagining that there is anything, culturally, that is theirs. To the people of the United States, the differences between us and Canada exist only as markers of their gentle inferiority.
The thing that’s most fascinating about Canada is the overlay of culture and identities that means their story is always about somebody else.
Let’s step back for a moment and remind ourselves that we know nothing about Canadian history. No one does. Who would? You learn about other countries only when you get conquered by them or want to eat their food. Canada isn’t conquering anyone, and their culinary offerings primarily involve frying gravy. Canada never made the world learn about it the way the USA did, with a long series of aggressive wars and fast-food franchises. You would have to choose to learn about Canada, and no one does that.
Let us begin at the beginning of white people. You’re probably like, “But Guy, the REAL story is the native peoples of Canada; their narrative is forgotten.” To that I would like to say, “Please, get to work unforgetting them. I will donate to any Kickstarter you kick-start.” But you see, you had no interest in exploring the stories of First Nations Canada until you wanted to tell me I was telling a story of Canada wrong. This is the resilient power of Canadian boringness to keep us from discussing them. You will try to train on a more progressive, more relevant story and, in the end, keep knowing nothing about Canada. Also, a bunch of the First Nations of Canada were also in the United States, because there weren’t national borders back then, so what have you done to learn about the Ojibwa,6 Salish,7 and Iroquois8 in your own country? I didn’t think so, so shut the hell up. I want to talk about Canada as it now exists, and that is a story that requires multiple races and cultures to tell.
