As if I needed another reason to love Tina Fey

03/15/2010 at 11:28 am | Posted in Celebri-tastic, Reading | 3 Comments
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She had this to say, in the March issue of Vogue:

“I don’t weigh myself. I just go by if my clothes fit. I try not to participate too much in the incredible amount of wasted energy that women have around dealing with food. I just feel like being healthy is sort of a job requirement to be on TV, and being a writer is so much coping with fatigue and stress, and you just eat. You eat to stay awake.”

“People will say, ‘Oh, fashion magazines are so bad, they’re giving girls a negative message’—but we’re also the fattest country in the world, so it’s not like we’re all looking at fashion magazines and not eating. Maybe it just starts a shame cycle: I’m never going to look like that model, so…Chicken McNuggets it is! And conversely, I don’t look at models who are crazy skinny and think I want to look like that, because a lot of them are gigantic, with giant hands and feet. Also, my dad is an artist—a painter by hobby—and I constantly would see realistic nudes. Because we were raised around art and went to museums and the women I grew up around were curvy…there wasn’t this value on skinny, skinny, skinny. Curvy was clearly meant to be the winner. I go up and down a few pounds with a relative amount of kindness to myself. And I have a daughter, and I don’t want her to waste her time on all of that.”

Amen, sister.

Toddler as teacher

01/19/2010 at 9:49 am | Posted in Belly to Butterfly | 3 Comments
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(This is part of the Belly to Butterfly series, written by my sis Laura.)

I’ve got an amazingly creative and spunky little niece…and the coolest part about Small Fry is that she isn’t even trying.

Before O was born, C and I were talking about things we hoped parenthood would do for us.  Learn patience was at the top of the list. One of my contributions to the conversation was to be more brave.

I look at Small Fry with her bright floral pants (picked out herself) that hug her “curves” snugly, her shirt stained with that day’s lunch, her velcro shoes and hair — that may or may not be cooperating depending on the weather, how much she’s run her hands through it and whether or not she’ll let Suzanne keep a “yellows” (aka barrette) in it — and I envy her.

She could go the whole day without looking in the mirror once and be fine. She knows who she is; she doesn’t need a mirror to tell her that. Last time she came for a visit, she walked in, hopped up on the couch (okay, I had to help her shimmy up there to stop her “up!up!up!” demands), pointed at her pants and said “pretty, pretty.”

Damn, I wish I was that confident.

Girls and body image is a big interest of mine and a conflict I observed daily as a middle school counselor. I dread the day Small Fry and O become wise to the pressures out there, but am hopeful that if we’re proactive in teaching them about its stupidity they’ll be brave and love themselves anyway.

In the meantime, I’m going to take a cue from my brazen niece and put on some “pretty pretty” pants, and to hell with how my butt looks in them!

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