chapter 1

Marietta Vecchio was looking for a dress. Not just any dress, but THE dress. She had finally snagged a date with Tony Caputo, the hottest guy in her entire office building.

She wanted to look HOT. The only problem was that she was so skinny that no matter which dress she tried on, she still looked like a little girl. She had marched up and down five malls, seven dress shops, nine consignment stores, she even popped into the Salvation Army to see if THEY had anything. No success.

She had almost given up. She was walking out of the Salvation Army when she saw a dress shop. It was dingy looking and there were no dresses in the window, but there was something hypnotic about the store's name, The HIPPOdrome, Be All You Can BE!! Marietta didn't know what it was, but somehow she knew she just HAD to look inside.

Sitting by an old fashioned cash register was the fattest woman Marietta had ever seen. She must have weighed at least seven hundred pounds. She was so fat, in fact, that she was practically ageless. She could have been 18 but she just as easily could have been 45.

Marietta said hello and told the saleslady that she was looking for a dress, a very special dress that would make her stand out. The woman stroked her chin, thought for a moment, and said, "I have just the dress for you!".

The saleslady waddled her way to the back of the store and returned about fifteen minutes later with a drab looking black dress. It looked like one of the dresses her grandmother used to wear. She told Marietta to go into the back room and try on the dress to see if it fit.

Marietta was SURE this was a dumb idea. Just by looking at the dress it would never fit, it was much too big, and besides, that dress went out of style before her grandmother had even been born. But just as she was about to politely decline and leave the store, a voice in the back of her head said, "Go ahead, try it on, what have you got to lose?".

And so she did. What a disaster. It looked to be at least eight sizes too big. It was cut so low it went down below Marietta's navel and it was so dull looking, certainly NOT the kind of dress that would get Tony's attention. But then a strange thing started to happen. Suddenly the dress took on a sheen and style it didn't have before. If it hadn't been so big it might have even been considered stylish. Just as Marietta was beginning to think the dress had possibilities, an even stranger thing began to happen.

She was standing in front of the mirror in the shop thinking about how she might get the dress altered when suddenly the dress seemed to fit a bit better. It went from looking like a tent to seeming to be just a bit baggy. Marietta could see some real possibilities in the dress and was about to ask if she could see something like it but in a smaller size when the dress started to feel a lot more comfortable. It certainly wasn't baggy, in fact, it was starting to feel the least little tight.

The saleslady seemed VERY pleased and flashed Marietta an enigmatic smile. It was as if she knew something mysterious was going on, something she had seen before.

Marietta was starting to LOVE the dress. One could almost say she was enchanted with it, so enchanted, in fact, that she didn't notice that it wasn't the dress that was changing, it was HER. Yes, the dress wasn't shrinking to fit Marietta's waif-like figure, Marietta was growing to fill out the dress. Her boobs went from a 30 A cup to a 44 DD. Her belly ballooned out to the point that she looked as if she was six months pregnant. Her hips expanded and her butt rounded out. Before Marietta knew it she had gone from a five foot eighty pound elf of a girl to a five foot eight, two hundred fifty pound big beautiful woman.

For the first time in her adult life, Marietta had curves, LOTS of curves. And rolls of fat. And a double chin. As she saw her reflection in the mirror, she turned to the saleslady and said, "I'll take the dress. How much is it?".

The saleslady simply smiled and said, "Don't worry about it, it's on the house!!".

Marietta waddled out the front door of the shop a changed woman, knowing that now she truly WAS all the woman she could be