While sauntering through Herald Square yesterday and test-driving my new pimp-strut (I think it may need a little more dip in the front step), I happened upon a scene of American gluttony near stereotypical proportions. 3 obese women and their one medium-sized friend (maybe she shrunk in the wash) sat around a small circular park table having a fried chicken party. Each rotund woman had her own 16-piece bucket nestled in her lap that she dug into while a grease moustache-goatee formed a ring around her feeding hole. When a bucket was done, she would don it upon her head as her party hat.The diameter of the table they sat around was only half that of one of the monster-truck-tire stomachs of these Bertha-sized women. It had the effect of making the party look like a trio of walruses and a blowfish hovering over a pre-school stool that served as a countertop for their chow. One woman had bone hanging out her mouth like a toothpick while she gammed away. And there were enough bones strewn about that one might mistake them for grave-diggers. But they were only digging into fried chicken (or Fried C; KFC isn't exactly chicken) with their teeth, and yet, with each dig, they were one step closer to the grave.
Like any good New Yorker, I stopped in my tracks to observe the spectacle with little regard for propriety. I pointed at them and took polaroids too. Sorry, the polaroids are not to be shared; they're for my personal collection of "Awful Things I Can't Keep My Eyes Off Of." I watched as they devoured that chicken as if they hadn't seen food in three weeks, but yet it was clear from the way their butts enveloped their chairs like a tub of playdough over a child's finger that starvation was certainly not the case here. I waited with bated breath to see who the the first to keel over would be.I do however feel ashamed for critiquing the bodies and eating habits of these women. I do acknowledge the fact that everyone has a different body type from walking stick to frog body to pear-shaped to Abominable Snowperson. But the combination of them all sitting together around a tiny table inhaling buckets worth of fried meat in the middle of Herald Square for everyone to see made the moment all the more absurd and thus, open to ridicule.
Perhaps I'm being too callous. I should instead celebrate the fact that through their fried chicken party, these bold women were simply defying the rigid and ridiculous standards of American beauty (not to be confused with the classic Kevin Spacey film) and in Manhattan no less, an island that has more unsightly skinny people than North Korea (eww concentration camp joke? poor form). So if it's an act of defiance, a counterhegemonic protest, then that I can get behind. However, I refuse to literally get behind one of these women. KFC = Kentucky Flatulance Catalyst.
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