Robert Manners

My Clothes Are Too Big!

So much good news this week... like, all those 36-waist pants I bought before I started to the gym? I can't wear them anymore! Unless, of course, I want to wear them halfway down my hip with my underwear-brand showing (which I wouldn't mind, except that it's a little too-young a look for me, and today's underwear is Hanes, not a brand to inspire envy). Even the few 35s I bought are a bit big, the ones I'm wearing right now, I keep having to hike them up so I don't step on the hems. And not to put too fine a point on it, but my underwear is a bit loose, too.



On the unfortunate side (because everything has a down-side), the fat pants are the only ones that are clean. I really need to do some laundry. But in the meantime, I am going to enjoy hiking up my pants around my much-slimmer waist. Almost as much as I enjoy seeing my cheekbones when I look in the mirror (O! how I missed those cheekbones)!



I seem to have plateau-ed on my weight-loss (I'm stuck between 200 and 205), but the Pilates and other exercises are starting to tone things up a bit. I feel like I can wear horizontal stripes again, and close-fitting sweaters (so long as they're in dark colors), and strapless evening gowns.



And speaking of evening gowns, another good piece of news: on Sunday, my Boys were returned to me! The Boys are my first furs, the silver-tipped brown fox boa that I'm wearing in the photograph at the top of the Cast list (or, if I've changed it by the time you read this, the ones I'm wearing here) and which Antinöus is also wearing for his cast-list shot.



The last time I wore them was at the Galaxy Photo-shoot Party at Ivy & Nick's place; it was raining (or, rather, deluging) that night, and I had a lot of stuff to carry on the way back to the car... one of those things was a hanger carrying my foxes and my ostrich-trimmed cardigan wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. I was quite sure I'd brought it out of the house and put it in my car, but when I went to look for them, they weren't there. I called up Ivy, but she hadn't seen them at her house... so I had to assume that I had dropped the hanger while I was walking with my many bags, or laid the hanger down on the outside of the car while hoisting something into the back seat, and forgot about them.



I was terribly upset by this, as you can imagine... not only the loss of such fabulous accessories, but I had this terrible vision of those poor innocent foxes lying in a wet gutter, getting drenched and walked on and run over, their deaths wasted as their beautiful remains disintigrated in the elements, unloved and unappreciated.



However, this last Sunday at the AIDS Marathon Fundraiser held at Martuni's, Nick told me he had a surprise for me: when he and Ivy were digging around for a drag item of Ivy's, they found this weird garbage bag stuck under the bed... they opened it and there were the Boys and the sweater! So they brought them to the show, and during the intermission we went out and retrieved them from the car. I was so happy to see them again! So happy, in fact, that I decided to wear the furs for my performance, despite the fact that it is the middle of August (my performance, by the way, was "I Never Do Anything Twice" by Millicent Martin; I wore my good old standby black sequin dress, a simple but effective knee-length chemise with three-quarter sleeves and a square neckline, with plenty of jewels).



Of course, my week hasn't been an orgy of undiluted pleasure. Among all this fun and amusement, I am really feeling my Depression: the low feelings of sadness and/or lethargy, the sudden manic moments usually brought on by my heightened libido (in recent conversations I've discovered that other people also get really horny when they're depressed, which suggests an interesting field of study), the inability to get to sleep before 12:30, despite having got out of bed early in the morning (most recently at 5:45 yesterday morning, and all day long I felt like I'd been up for three days... and still didn't get to sleep until well after midnight). But this, too, shall pass... everything always does.



Well, my boss just came into the office, so I guess I'd better pretend to do some work. I've learned to set more realistic goals each morning in my log (today's goal: Survive), and I've just been given a pleasant project, writing thank-you notes to all the people who attended the leadership workshop we held yesterday (for which I had to get out of bed at 5:45 to be at the Berkeley Doubletree from 8 a.m to 6 p.m.)... nevertheless, when the boss is here, I like to give him the impression that I care about what he thinks, and to do that I shouldn't be sitting here writing about my own life.



And so, off I go, to write thank-you notes and survive.