Audrey is in another couture gown - a flame coloured, Volcano orange, strapless Lacroix that's modeled to her slim form like a mermaid's tail. I can't face the freaking black lycra which has now done two boat race balls, one opening of the V&A couture collection and three Gala dinners at the Met. I hate it. I simply cannot wear the same dress for the nineteenth time even if nobody is looking closely enough at me to notice or care. Instead I put on a short silk frock I bought at the Holy Grail of LK Bennett which has been thoughtless enough to open a branch at Terminal 4. It's pink. It's vaguely leopard print. I wear it with long drop pink quartz and diamond ear-rings and the anacondas. My hair is a big Jacqueline Susann/Jackie Collins flick and as I walk into the hallowed marble hall of the Metropolitan Club which Audrey had assured me wouldn't be as fancy as the Opera, and see one woman after another walk in and pose for the camera in their designer outfits, I realise she lied. Suddenly feel like Eurotrash Barbie. They are all so fancy and sooooo thin. It's a religion. And while they're worshiping at the shrine of skinny I'm the equivalent of the sullen native still running around in beads and a loincloth with five stomachs, waiting to be converted.
Why am I even here, I whisper to my escort for the evening who is resplendent in an oyster grey silk pantsuit and more in my size range than the toothpicks elsewhere.
Let's get you a drink, she soothes, and we walk off in the direction of the bar where there is a line of people ignoring the liquor and waiting for water. I spy a man with a tray of champagne and almost knock over the competition in the rush to break ranks and circumvent the bar to get to him first. Then I join the debonaire uncles in the corner, mercifully just by the door through which the canapes make their entrance, and all's well in fat Marion world.
The place is huge and impressive. It's like Versailles on steroids, with a vast echoing marble lined hall with ornate plasterwork, ormulu everything, and a heavily embossed gilt ceiling that looks like the inside of a box of chocolates after all the candy has been eaten, dipped in gold. There's a twin staircase that bends its knees in the middle and then extends to the galleried upper levels, with a thick, plush red carpet that absorbs the deafening sound of money, and at the summit of which you need oxygen.
The air conditioning is frigid, which we later decide must have been to keep the lobster appetizer chilled on the tables of the dining room upstairs.
Nipples on parade, I murmur to my friend as we shivered. She laughs. Actually, she hoots in a deep throaty southern, twenty cigarettes a day, roar despite the fact that she's a clean living wry-humoured New Yorker. A man goes round the room banging the f*** out of a hoarse xylophone which is the signal for us to assemble in the concert room, another confection of stucco and ceiling frescos, where we sit like we're at the front row of a runway show and admire the dresses. Or not, as the case may be.
It's terribly glamorous and glittering but you know, just because you have money, it doesn't mean you have taste. And just because you're thin, doesn't mean your body is gym trim.
There is an older woman whose cheek bones could be implants slipping out of place and heavy black eye make up and with arms like chicken bones from which the flesh had been picked. I see her panda eyes flick over us as she ambles past wondering if we are someone she needs to acknowledge and favour with the lip twitch that passes for a smile. We aren't. Almost everyone wears thin to some degree or another. Fat is the devil. And I am the antiChrist. Or at least one of his handmaidens.
Fat says you're slothful. You have no self-control. You are lazy, don't exercise (people here are at pains to tell you they exercise because it makes them feel good not because they have to), cannot control your urges, you are a loser - except of weight. To say 'you've lost weight' is like saying 'God Bless You'. It's approval, it's a benediction.
In an article on Saturday's New York Magazine that's devoted to 'wellness' and health, a woman talks about how you manage to keep your kids slim and happy with their bodies (as long as they are slim natch) without infecting them with food paranoia and eating disorders. You are a failure if your kid is fat, she says. Nobody wants a fat daughter - and though she doesn't know one woman who doesn't share her own 'food issues', she didn't want to pass them on. You want your kids to be skinny without being neurotic. So when her five year old girl said to her 'mommy don't get fat' she is relieved - she's on message, but 'well at least she didn't hear if from me...' No instead she claims she gets it from Disney Films (really - how the hell did I grow up in the Snow White and Cinderella era without becoming anorexic?) But this is the country where the President goes on record saying his daughter was getting 'a little chubby' and where Michele Obama talks about the fact that her pediatrician told her she had to watch her daughters' BMI and so now she has fruit on the table. This is a high flying lawyer married to the US President? Now she has fruit on the table? And to think that one of the things I liked most about her was that she was a normal size... Watch this dwindling space, surely?
I have issues too. I like food. I hate exercise. I don't exercise because it makes me feel good - it freaking doesn't. It makes me feel tired and cranky. I like sitting down. I like going to bed, mostly to sleep - but if I stay awake all night when I have company, so much the better, and then it counts as a work-out. Frankly I depend on it for cardio-vascular fitness. My idea of exercise is taking a walk somewhere I need to go anyway, or dancing with a sweaty man who comes up to my chest in a hot dancehall. I would like to be less padded but it's true - I have urges. I also have no self control. Life is better with butter. And though I can't convince veggie warmLuke that there's nothing without sugar that isn't improved with bacon, it's still one of my bylaws. But of course, I'm terrified of muffins the size of a farmer's fist that have 500 calories in them, and I hate feeling like I have floated into town on the back of a truck for the Macy's parade, while everybody else looks like the rope tying me down.
But at least I don't have a backless mini that shows off my sexy tattoo, and a black bra strap. And at least you can't see the top of my knickers at the base of a swanky, strapless gown. At least my boobs don't fall out of the sides of my halter top like they've disagreed with my ribcage (they are two, too busy sparring with my chin). At least I'm not wearing a low cut off the shoulder dress that beautifully displays my white tan bikini stencil from my recent Caribbean holiday. Miaou, miaou, miaou... I doesn't make me feel any more appealing though.
So yep. They're rich and thin and they have expensive clothes, but they're not all perfect, nor do they all have particularly good taste (this from a woman in pink leopard skin). Or maybe it's just a lack of foresight.
I'm a bit lacking on the foresight myself.
My Eurotrash Barbie dress is fairly short when I sit down and through my, what I must learn to call hose, you can clearly see the ridge where anaconda begins and my legs end. It's super sexy. Luckily I've brought a scarf which I drape ridiculously across my knees like they're in a hijab. It's a black vintage (ie old and second hand) silver studded wrap from the 1920s and clashes with the dress. But hey, I disappeared at fat, so I don't think it matters.
If I didn't live in New York, I'd weigh three hundred pounds, said Luis, earlier as he was soothing both me and my hair. You're not that big. They had Jamie Oliver on the television in some town in Louisiana where everyone is overweight telling them that you can't be cremated if you are obese as they can't fit the coffin in the stove, and anyway, not all of you burns.
Jeez, that was a cheery thought. Too fat to fry...
Music plays. Blissful, wonderful, beautiful music plays. I can't stop enthusing inwardly about how beautiful they look just swaying together energetically like they have been choreographed - everyone feeling each note they play: Bach, Chopin, Bach again, Haydn and a trumpet fanfare specially commissioned for the two honourees that I can't like, though I try because it's such a lovely idea. To me, it sounds like a whoopee cushion being bounced on and more of a raspberry than an accolade. But what do I know?. I'm a British woman in animal print who wants hackneyed old Pachebel's Canon at her funeral and whose kids have been practicing it for more years than is complimentary. Speeches are made. The son of somebody stands up to fete his mother and cannot think of anything to say that encapsulates her huge contribution to the Orchestra other than she takes a while to get ready to go out and calls all her friends to tell them about it. Geez. I clap, mentally saluting my own children who, might call me Queen Psycho Bitch, but at least would never be able to eulogise over how long it takes me to put on my clothes and call it a positive personality trait. I wonder if this guy is practicing anything on his recorder...
Upstairs we're eating lobster salad with cilantro - coriander on the other side of the unreachable pond -which people either love or hate. Socrates, thinks it tastes like soap. I love it. I love the bread that is passed round which nobody else eats. I'd love the butter even more but I'm too afraid to touch its smooth virgin surface that is probably going to go back to the kitchen as unperturbed as a botoxed forehead. It is probably the same pat of butter that's been around since 2006 that just goes in and out of the refrigerator. With the lobster out of the way they turn up the heat and bring lamb chops. The portion size of this and the ensuing chocolate mousse cake, is positively mid western. I eat it all. I'm tired. The wine waiter ignores my empty glass. I don't think the rich drink as much as I do and this may be the secret to their alertness after eleven o'clock.
The stretch limo is waiting outside. A doorman lurches towards it and grabs the handle as I try to get inside. Double dammit. If I bend over the anaconda will stop eating the pink leopard and since I'm first in I have to get over to the far side of the limo without doing a Fosbury flop - this cannot be accomplished with an audience. Don't people go to finishing school in 1965 to learn how to get in and out of cars without showing their knickers, especially their heavily elasticised knickers? My friend reminds me that her mother says you should never have your ass higher than your head.
Yeah, well not in a car anyway.
