Memories of Thinness

I often think about a dream place where I'll be thin again--like 1970s thin, which was different than today's straight-up-and-down female thinness. It's some sort of amalgamation of the impressions that ruled my childhood, Fast Times at Ridgemont High crossed with Charlie's Angels, sprinkled with a few Blondie and Duran Duran videos. In the late 70s and early 80s everyone was still effortlessly thin (or so it seemed to be effortless) as those days were still largely untainted by the effects of hydrogenated fats, corn syrup, or fast food bigger than the single McDonald's hamburger. My mom and all her friends were very thin, as is attested to by the photographs of the time, and everybody still smoked. Although the past was never the halcyon time that it seems in retrospect, the large majority of people one saw anywhere were slender to very thin, and they seemed to be so without any effort (the extent of exercise at the time being tennis, bowling, and disco dancing). "Overweight" was the 50 year old guy with skinny arms and legs and a slight beer belly, and I mean SLIGHT by today's standards. But, maybe this was only my child's perception of the 1970s--that everybody was so effortlessly svelte.

After all, dexedrine and benzedrine were still prescribed to "tired" housewives on a regular basis, as were quaaludes, Valium, and even Demerol, all of which are powerful appetite suppressants. Not to mention how much cocaine most of my childhood idols imbibed. My sense that all these people were "naturally" thin was most likely an illusion that the era created by proxy. Betty Ford still drank and popped pills then. Did anybody notice that Americans sort of began to balloon in the 1980s? Not that I'm advocating drug taking for weight control. It's just an interesting coincidence, and perhaps not any coincidence at all. The 70s were, after all, the ten years just before Nancy Reagan's declaration of the "War on Drugs," which occurred right at the time that every major American city was being decimated by the scourge of crack cocaine. Unfortunately, that "war" could never be won--the effects of which can be seen in crack's stranglehold on both urban and rural communities still today.

But I digress. If there is a link between the preternaturally thin masses of the 70s and the rise of the drug culture after the 1960s, it doesn't much explain the previous decades of the 20th century. Of course, before the 1950s, most people in the U.S. had to work very hard for any food that they would be lucky enough to get on their table. The rise of time-saving household appliances, the social welfare programs enacted after the Great Depression, mass-produced food stuffs, and urban migration lessened the American's connection between hard physical labor and food. Ironically, though, until the 1920s, if you had any kind of health problem (from sleeping problems to "digestive ailments") you could go to your local pharmacy and retrieve a sizable amount of cocaine hydrochlorate or tincture of laudanum, both excellent appetite suppressants.

My dream of ideal thinness isn't marred by drug addiction or the influence of a culture of pharmaceuticals. It remains a child's dream, in all ways hopelessly idealized and connected to my sensory impressions and recollections of the late 70s-early 80s. There is always a pool, sparkling & kidney shaped under a bowl of Idaho or Long Beach sky (two places my relatives lived at the time). The water reflects & absorbs that sky, as the hard glare of desert air bounces off my can of Coke (sweetened with cane sugar) and the bag of Clover Club potato chips my brother and I are eating. Hall & Oates and "Betty Davis Eyes," "Abacadabra" waft over the concrete from the transistor radio. We are all tan, feathery, enveloped in striped terry cloth shorts and the puffy iron-ons of our T-shirts. A jet plane intersects the turquoise sky. And no one, not anyone in the picture, is fat.