chapter 18

You'd think finding a skinny girl who would be willing to put on a pound or two would be easy. And yes, I AM painfully aware about America's obsession with fitness and being in shape. After all, I've got enough shape for SIX girls! But look around you some time. Say you're in a mall somewhere. Sure, you'll see a fair number of skinny chicks out there strutting their stuff. But right next to THEM will be a bunch of chubsters, walking around with their bellies exposed and their boobs flopping all over the place.

More to the point, we were sure at least a few thin girls would have come to the realization that staying slim is a bitch. You have to watch everything you eat, counting every calorie. And if by some miracle you allow yourself to over-indulge, then you have to spend hours in the gym, subjecting yourself to hours of tortuous exercise.

Even worse, staying slim is expensive. Look around a grocery store some time. You can find cheap, tasty food all over the place. Usually they're full of fat, sugar or salt and loaded down with enough calories to feed a family of four for a week. On the other hand, finding food that will help you maintain a slim, trim figure and yet at the same time doesn't taste like library paste or cardboard, at a reasonable price is practically impossible.

So when Mario and I set out to find a thin girl to be our waitress/feedee we thought it would be a snap. Were we ever wrong. Oh, we got a lot of replies all right. But it was absolutely amazing to us to discover how many chubby women have come to think of themselves as thin. After over two weeks of going over resumes and doing interviews, we were almost tempted to just give up and hire a couple of cute little plumpers and let it go at that. Then Marci stepped into our lives.

To say that Marci Miles was thin would have been an example of supreme exaggeration. She was SKINNY!!! She stood almost six feet one inch and she barely touched one hundred twenty pounds on our makeshift scale. Her face was gaunt, her arms and legs looked like matchsticks and if she had a pair of boobs, she kept them well hidden.

She had been skinny all her life with a metabolism that just wouldn't quit. She ate like a lumberjack, or so she said, and yet she looked like a thin version of Popeye's Olive Oyl. You would have thought that a girl who had a figure you'd find on the cover of fashion magazines would have been happy and content. But for some reason, Marci had always wanted to be fat. Not chubby. Not plump. Not even run-of-the-mill fat, but HUGE.

Once Mario and I had interviewed her, we KNEW we had our girl. Little did we know the challenge she would provide us. You see, Marci wasn't just kidding around about having a super-duper metabolism. Before we opened FEEDERS, we decided to see just how good this supposedly super-efficient metabolism was. Mario outdid himself in churning out meal after scrumptuous meal, and Marci matched him morsel for morsel. By rights, she should have gained at least ten pounds that week. Instead, she put on one! This was going to be a challenge all right. But Mario was up to it on his end and I decided to take Marci under my wing. If anybody knew about how to get FAT, it was me. And so the Ballad of Marci Miles was set to begin!!