Dr. Summer Sausage, Phd

My brother, Steve, was a really fat baby. He looked like the love child of Winston Churchill and Sophie Tucker.
Maybe it was the cake. He did love his angel food with chocolate icing.
Genes are mysterious things because somewhere around age four or five Steve got skinny, and stayed that way.
On the other hand, I was a skinny child until around age nine. After noticing that my cousin got constant praise from adults for cleaning his plate I decided to do the same. Soon I found that food was actually GOOD and packed it away accordingly. Basking in the compliments I got from the BIG people earned me proud membership in the Big Eaters Club and all was right with the world...for awhile.

My training regime from age nine to fourteen was comprised of eating, goofing off, and reading comic books. Soon I was, as mom would put it, "big boned". (Shouldn't that be "big intestined"?) My old man didn't believe in euphemisms; he called me FAT. "Geez, look at that gut on you!" and "How old are you fatso? You look fifty!" were often offered as observations. I just blew it off and went for another sandwich. Sorry dad.

No, the one that got me occured at school on picture day in the Autumn of my thirteenth year. Picture day, that day where the local photographer who submitted the lowest bid comes to your school to snap some really horrible shots of your visage to sell to your mom. You know....the ones where your hair is all messed up, your face riven with acne and, oh yeah, YOU BLINKED. THAT picture day.
At our school the local picture yokel would try to make you smile by teasing you with a nickname or two. It never worked, but it was his "act". When my turn before the camera came he got me to smile by referring to me as "Mr. Summer Sausage" which I found amusing. (I don't know, it just sounded funny.) It wasn't until I had returned to my desk that I realized that the dude had basically called me FAT. The son of a bitch!
I worried about being "Mr. Summer Sausage" for days. At first I sought solace in food, but soon came to think that maybe playing a little more ball and eating a lot less food might do wonders for my corpulent physique. It did. A year later I was looking better, you know, NORMAL. Best of all, the girls in my class were now speaking to me. AMAZING!
I have kept the weight off ever since.

Last Monday I picked-up the paper to discover that I have wasted my life in denial. San Diego State University , SDSU, now has a major in FAT STUDIES. According to the university fat studies is an emerging academic field that explores the social and political consequences of being overweight. The fact that 67 percent of American adults are overweight or obese has prompted the university to take up their cause.
Here is an excerpt from "The Fat Studies Reader": "Overweight is inherently anti-fat. It implies an extreme goal: Instead of a bell curve distribution of human weights, it calls for a lone, towering, unlikely bar graph with everyone occupying the same (thin) weights."

San Diego State professor Esther Rothblum, who is considered a leading scholar in the field says, " It's a field that believes all people should be treated with respect, regardless of body size."

Does this remind anybody else of the old "My mother, drunk or sober" argument we heard so much of during the conflict in Vietnam?

The good professor notes that she may be considered fat but that she is healthy. She went on to say that she has been playing racquetball for 30 years and recently placed third in her division at the Gay Games. She is 5 feet 4 and weighs 230 pounds. I'll leave you to speculate on where she may have finished if she'd trimmed down to a mere 180 pounds.

Now that I've thought about it....WHO CARES??!!! I'M GOING BACK TO COLLEGE!

It's the new FAT STUDIES major for me.

Pass the pie and the PHD. Mr. Summer Sausage is HUNGRY!