Orchestra or balcony…. what they want is what you see

I just saw A Chorus Line.

They are promoting it with the tag line  “The Best Musical.  Ever.”

I agree, but as I watched, much as I love it, much as I see it has an amazing amount and variety of valuable life lessons, much as it meant to me as a gay adolescent growing up in the seventies, I also noticed something.    It is full of negative messages about being fat.

Like …  “all thanks to sis, now married and fat” ;  “mother, fat, always in the kitchen, cooking all the time”;  “different is nice, but it sure isn’t pretty, pretty is what it’s about”;  “Connie:  I think I’ll go live on our 50 acres in Vermont, spend all the time in the kitchen and getting fat.    Christine:   That sounds great.   Except the “fat” part.”; 

And of course, the song with the message that your looks matter more than anything else:   Dance Ten, Looks Three – the musical homage to plastic surgery.

Funny how I could have seen that show at least half a dozen times growing up and spent countless days lying on the living room carpet listening to the album, and still not immediately think of it when I thought of having plastic surgery.

Have it all done, honey take my word

Grab a cab, come on, see the wizard on Park and 73rd for…..

tits, and ass

Orchestra and balcony

What they want is what you see

Keep the best of you, do the rest of you

 

Well, they are performers.   But I don’t think it matters.   Those are the messages we’re bombarded with growing up.  And being fat since I was six, I can’t imagine how many messages I’ve received from songs, tv, movies, books and other people that there was something wrong with me.   And maybe there was, but there was no way a six year old was able to figure out that she should adjust her calorie intake and calorie outflow balance, work on aerobic and muscle building exercises and change her body fat percentage.   Instead she just learned what she was being taught – she wasn’t good enough and she never would be.