chapter 1

Tiffany Edwards was a reporter for the Chicago Reader. Not hard news, not sports. Too many facts to keep straight. No Tiffany was a feature writer. She LOVED to make up stories and then search out the facts that would turn her story into fiction.

Her boss was the features editor, Bud Carson. He was 68 years old and pretty much old school. Let's put it this way, the word sensitive and Bud were never associated with each other. He wasn't mean or anything and certainly not an abuser. The best way to describe Bud was socially oblivious.

At any rate, normally Tiffany's vast imagination could churn out stories at the drop of a hat. But one day in early June she hit the classic writer's block. Try as she might, she couldn't come up with an idea for a story if her life depended on it. Well, her life didn't, but her job did. Bud told her that if she didn't have an idea on his desk by 4 P.M. then HE'D come up with something.

Well, like clockwork, four in the afternoon came and Tiffany had nothing. Well, it just so happens that Bud had been toying with an idea for months. The women in his family were all significantly overweight and Bud had been 5'11 and 140 since his freshman year in college. What he constantly got from his wife and five daughters was that he just didn't know what it was like to be a fat woman in a society that ostensibly adored thinness. So his idea was to have a feature writer tackle the subject. The only trouble was that all four of his female feature writers was thin as a rail.

Well, on that fateful day in June, it came to him. Why not just get a skinny girl to put on a fat suit? That way she could see the world from the perspective of a fat girl without having to put on a hundred pounds or so. He pitched the idea to three of his feature writers and they turned him down flat. But when four o'clock came and Tiffany came to him with nothing, Bud TOLD her what she was going to do.

At first Tiffany was livid. The whole idea was abhorrent to her. It was demeaning and sexist and, more to the point, it was just too stupid to work. But Bud put it to Tiffany this way, either you do the article I outlined to you, or you can go back to the obituary department. That was when Tiffany went shopping for a fat suit!