Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Delta Burke's culturally absurd diet

Prior to encountering the likes of Saul Bellow, there were what I think of as the Maltzian dark ages, during which I watched a great deal of "Designing Women". So of course I had to read this profile of Delta Burke, which is structured in a similar way as the interview a while back with Mireille Giuliano, the differences being that Burke is a) not French, and b) unlikely to reject an inferior-quality croissant.

The NYT piece on Burke covers her "journey...into obesity, humiliation, self-acceptance and image adjustment," chronicling her weight and dress size fluctuations over the past few decades. We learn of modern-day Delta Burke: "She is not a skinny one today," and, "She looks a bit chubby, unequivocally pretty and entirely real." We get the picture. She's not minute. Not reportably enormous, but that doesn't mean that whatever's there ought to go unreported. Also noted is Burke's current diet: "Now, she said, she nibbles fruit throughout the day, has a bowl of matzo ball soup for lunch and some ham and cheese for dinner." OK, this is certainly curious; what would make someone choose, as their only two substantial meals, matzo ball soup AND ham and cheese? That doesn't sit right, that sort of mixing and matching. Does she, like, have a chef whom she orders to prepare her matzo ball soup, and then, a few hours later, a ham and cheese sandwich? What a job that would be, being the person behind Delta Burke's culturally absurd but calorically sound meal plan.

I should point out that Burke's character, Suzanne Sugarbaker, was always my favorite of the Designing Women, the most over-the-top, the one whose shoulder pads and garish makeup made the most sense, and the one whom the camera often lingered on when there wasn't enough material to fill an entire scene; the camera lingered on Burke for maybe a third of the episodes in which she appeared. Her character's vacant gaze more or less sums up the show, which has calming, even sedative effects which, if bottled...

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