The Weight to be Me

“Oh my gawd! I love it! You look just like Brenda Morgenstern!” Maryanne squawks as she and the rest of the gang walk into my apartment. Wow. Not the look I was going for at all. I thought I was killing it with my Halloween costume as a 70’s hippie chick. Even though I’m greeting…

“Is Marisa here?” I ask John Wayne when he answers the door to their penthouse suite. Yep. That John Wayne.  It’s summer in Ocean Shores, Washington, and my dad and his band “The Mix Bag Trio” are the featured lounge act at The Canterbury Inn for the summer of ’73.  John Wayne is in town…

I attended my first 12-Step meeting (it was a women’s only group), when I was 16 years old. I didn’t have any idea what the program was about, but one of my closest girlfriends was the live-in nanny for a woman who rented out rooms in her house to people of all ages and backgrounds…

His Match.com profile reads “I’m just a spiritual guy out here living my best life in harmony with the Four Agreements.” It’s a little on the nose, but he checks all the important boxes: close in age-range, we live in the same area, ruggedly handsome, but not completely out of my league according to his…

I’ve been crushing on Jeff Reynolds since second grade – with his shaggy hair, big brown eyes, and a fashion sense that rivals Bobby Brady. He’s so cute with his brown corduroy bell-bottoms, orange and yellow striped t-shirt, and his low-top black Chucks. It’s our first day of 4th grade, and class is almost over, so…

Maria and I meet in acting class. I’m 23 and I’ve just moved to New York from Seattle. She’s a native New Yorker, 30-something, charming and quite charismatic – we become fast friends. She’s very stylish and petite but tells me she used to be fat before she lost a bunch of weight on a…

“Sometimes when we’re out in public, I get embarrassed that you are so much bigger than I am.” I sat there stunned in a fancy Toronto hotel room where I’d just spent what I thought was a romantic week with my new boyfriend. A few minutes later, he took a deep breath “Wow. I feel…

“You know, there’s a reason you ain’t been up to my apartment, and I haven’t been to yours.” We’d been flirting for months, and our attraction to each other was gaining momentum – the “tension” was most certainly there. As we stood side by side in the freezing cold by my car outside his apartment complex,…

One day my brother calls from New York and tells us that he’s registered and paid for all of us to take the “Est training” here in Seattle. I’m like “the what training?” Two of my brothers, who both live in Manhattan, have both become simultaneously involved in Amway and “Est” since our brother Kim’s…