Fat Wedding

[Hawkman]

The groom was quite skinny
the bride was immense,
a blimpish white taffeta
air-raid defence, who,
floating with gravity close to the ground,
resembled cu-nimbus,
or thunder cloud.
He couldn’t embrace her,
his arms wouldn’t reach,
but he hung from her lips like a kind of leech,
as out on the dance floor, they twirled
round and round;
he was in orbit—
her mass was profound.
Some of the guests
were also quite tubby;
girls in short skirts and tattoos
out with hubby.
They fell on the food,
which was quickly devoured,
then waddled away on high-heels like towers
and sitting outside they sucked on their fags
shrieking and laughing
like Shakespeare’s hags.

[Haunted]

Love it! The portrayal is outstanding, it deserves a round of fat applause :D

[Hawkman]

That sound of splatting is the sound of fat hands clapping ;) Thanks Haunt, for leering at the laughable lunacy and raw reality of 21st century marriage celebrations :D I am tortured by the memory of short, bare, flabby legs, perching on clunky platforms with 6 inch heels, as they dangled below pelmet-skirted frocks, stretched to breaking point. Oh, and those tattoos! Emotionally and esthetically, I'm permanently scarred!

Live and be well - H

[blank|verse]

It reads like Betjeman or Philip Larkin, particulary 'The Whitsun Weddings', with its aloof narrator passing comment on the hoi polloi.

The form feels like it should be broken into quatrains; and there's a good use of dactyls, which helps add to the comical tone, and is nicely-achieved. You might consider adding an extra stressed words before 'kind' in 'kind of leach' - and then quietly correcting the spelling of 'leech' while you're at it! :)

[Hawkman]

I think Larkin was somewhat larger in scope whereas I'm more focused on the specifics of the event :D quite chuffed to be compared with both Larkin and Betjeman though! I did consider writing in quatrains, but I made a conscious decision not to as it allowed me more flexibility to play with line length. I had been wondering about replacing a with some before kind of leach. I've deliberately dropped the odd beat, but I think it would read more smoothly with the change. Oh, and thanks for picking up he typo.

Cheers, H

[Jerrybaldy]

Outstanding in its rhythm and rhyming Birdman. It's smoother than the best man's hair gel.

[Hawkman]

Er, I don't know how to tell you this, but he was bald! Wasn't you was it? :cornut:

[AuntShecky]

"My Big Fat American Wedding" might be the alternative title, because, man, I can't get over the increased collective girth in my beloved country. Decades ago when I was a little whippersnapper (then, as now, more similar in mass to a whippet than a St. Bernard), I'd watch the news on our black-and-white TV and shake my head on the relative per capita weight of the Soviet women (such as the jolly-looking but decidedly rotund Nina Khrushchev) in comparison
with the relatively slimmer silhouettes of American women, such as astronauts' wives. (Ironically, back then, typical home menus were heavy on real butter, whole milk, bacon and eggs, fatty meats, rich desserts smothered in whipped cream, pie with crusts made with lard, but at the same time there were maybe one or two "fat" kids on the block.)

But sometime in the Cold War era the tables flipped, when our national profile started getting fatter, to the point where, as early as the 1960s JFK pushed for fitness, with its highly-publicized "fifty mile walks," etc. Maybe it had something to do with the rise of suburbia (where the lack of sidewalks made driving rather than walking a necessity) along with the onslaught of high-caloric and overly convenient fast-food joints establishing the abomination known as "recreational eating." Then came the rise of personal computers and video games, which tended to keep kids inside and sedentary rather than outside in the fresh air and moving around playing sandlot ball and the like.

As a result the typical middle-aged American is chronically overweight, an alarming number acutely obese, with the myriad of associated health problems. But in the U.S., it is the aesthetic problem that produces panic in housewives, which supports billion dollar industries in diet and fitness, neither of which permanently fixes the problem.

The "beer belly" evidently is a masculine characteristic, but because men are more likely to engage in some form of physical,albeit minimal, activity, there seems (to me,anyway)to be fewer fat men than fat women. The odds of a woman emerging from childbearing years into menopause without gaining weight are pretty, well, slim. That is why a pair of sweatpants marked size "Medium" at Walmarts looks and feels like a parachute with a waistband the circumference of the wheel of a tractor.

This is why your poem -- funny, sardonic, spot-on-- is also dismayingly true. Apparently, a "pleasantly plump" woman can attract a man as well as a less corpulent woman. No longer does she have to "crash" diet and frantically slim down in the ticking countdown so she'll fit into her wedding gown on the big day.

In our culture, "Barbie" is still the feminine ideal-- as buxom as Bardot at the same time the rest of her anatomy is as slim as a poker. This is unachievable, especially when the availablity of "recreational-style" snacks 24/7 is considered an entitlement and the wholesale buying into the myth that eating, like taking a pain-killer, is a pallative against stress and anxiety.

But the truth is in 2013 Mrs. America looks like Nina K.

[Hawkman]

Hi Auntie. So, you have discovered the true reason for the expansion of the American middle - A dastardly soviet plot to make Americans too fat to go to war whilst increasing their capitalist death rate from heart disease! Of course, Brits were too severely rationed in the immediate post-war period to be able to get fat before the 1960s. Only the wealthy had that sort of luxury, and politicians have always had an excuse, I guess, especially those who started out with a tradition of Edwardian excess :D

School games lessons were fairly effective in keeping the kids active, until the 1980s when all the school playing fields were sold off to developers for building land. That was a conservative idea, but then the left-wingers in the labour party thought competition was unhealthy and bread aggressive tendencies in the young... So, being overweight is no longer an American preserve, it has spread throughout the developed world to the extent that thinness is now a luxury only available in places like Darfur.

As for the attractiveness of excessively plump women to the male; well I guess it's a case of each to his own, in the taste department. I've seen stunning elfin creatures apparently besotted with corpulent men too. Maybe it's a Darwinian thing: The skinny women think the fat men must be good providers, and the skinny blokes (who are obviously starving) see a chubby girl and reckon they'll be well fed! :D

I'm not sure that the Barbie Ideal of feminine perfection is completely unachievable though. I was at a wedding the other day where the bride was tall and slim, had a perfect hourglass figure and still managed to possess a bust which you could land a helicopter on. Of course, she may have paid for the bust ;)

Now cosmetic surgery is something designed to short circuit Darwinian natural selection. A handsome guy sees a gal who's apparently a goddess and falls madly in love. The couple get married and have impossibly ugly children. Why? because the goddess's genes are inferior. She's been cut into the semblance of a goddess when her natural countenance is that of a bulldog chewing a wasp. So much for Eugenics - lol.

Thanks for reading and leaving such a detailed note!

Live and be well - H

[AuntShecky]

Thanks, Hawk, for not only tolerating my rant but also enlightening us on the history behind obesity on John Bull's island.

I'm grateful that you don't seem to mind that I didn't offer more direct comments on the structure of your piece itself. The reason for that is-- I couldn't think of a thing that I'd change.

But this ditty did indeed get me thinking about how we "Yanks" (and Red Sox fans, et. al) collectively got as fat as we are, collectively speaking.

Now, still inspired by this poem, I'm thinking about some of the relatively recent wedding customs, trendy little practices that can turn one's stomach. For instance, nothin' says lovin'
like a bride's shoving a slice of wedding cake into her groom's face!

[Hawkman]

You know, there's an old joke in these islands about the effects of eating wedding cake, specifically with regard to the bride's libido. ;)

Live long and prosper - H

[Whisper]

This is fun. A compact comedy scene. Weddings have a high propensity for hilarity, if one cares to be observant enough to notice. So I think the poem is apt.

[Hawkman]

Many thanks Whisper, glad you enjoyed it

Live long and prosper - H