Poor Nicholas Cage. One minute, he's enjoying a life of luxury, dressing in Armani suits and driving a Ferrari around Manhattan's Upper East Side.
The next, he's waking up in a ramshackle house in suburban New Jersey, with an over-salivating dog, two kids and a dumpy wife.
The dumpy wife is none other than Tea Leoni, the leggy star of films such as Deep Impact and Flirting With Disaster, and wife of X-Files hunk David Duchovny. Post-baby, Leoni has put on some extra pounds, and the media has heralded her return with headlines like "Back in a Big Way" and other clever references to her beefier constitution. Leoni, to her credit, doesn't give a hoot what Hollywood thinks of her new curves.
There's only one problem with this picture: the five-eight Leoni's weight gain has her breaking the scales at around 120 pounds. In the Christmas feel-good movie Family Man, in which she plays the loving wife in Cage's parallel life, the slinky Leoni fills in a pair of faded Levi's like an extra in a ZZ Top video.
This, I'm sad to say, is Hollywood's version of a suburban housewife who's let herself go, if only just a little.
As many of us spend the remaining days of 2000 tearing apart our office desks for that last Hershey's Kiss, and indulging in a daily regimen of leftover turkey, potato chips and brie, this is not the kind of news we want to hear. If we haven't already, by this time next week we'll be whipped into a frenzy of self-loathing and recriminations over the one, five, 10 or more pounds we put on over the holiday season.
The post-Christmas weight-loss panic has always been with us, but in this first year of the 21st century, the gap between our fantasy bodies and reality has never been more poignant, thanks to increasingly distorted media images of the ideal body.
Just when we thought a BMI of 24 (not overweight, but not thin) was within our grasps, along came 2000, the Year of the Anorexic. We tuned into Ally McBeal to watch Calista Flockhart, looking more like Karen Carpenter each day, while she and her handlers denied any problem.
Then the Practice's Lara Flynn Boyle started showing up at awards ceremonies wearing see-through dresses, inspiring young women everywhere to survive on a Breatharian diet.
Even Gwyneth Paltrow and her love rival Jennifer Aniston joined in the fad, transforming themselves into what is known in the fashion biz as a "lollipop": so stick-thin that one's head looks oversized.
If we need any further evidence that curves are out, then the dumping of the portly size-six Cindy Crawford -- did I mention she's really old now, at 34? -- as Revlon's spokesmodel sealed the deal.
In other words, nothing's changed since the days when Susan Dey of Partridge Family fame encouraged readers of fanzine Tiger Beat to eat mostly carrots and celery (Dey admitted years later she had been suffering from bulimia at the time).
I had a chance to view this phenomenon first-hand while attending both the Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 fashion shows held last year in New York. From the models to the various fashion editors and writers, emaciation was all the rage: I stood beside Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, a chillingly svelte woman who looks ripe for a wicked bout of osteoporosis; Lauren Holly, ex-wife of Jim Carrey, the size of a nine-year-old boy; and Sarah Jessica Parker, star of Sex and the City, so frail I swear I could have knocked her over with a feather.
In that world, anyone larger than a size eight is usually wearing a security guard uniform or is sweeping up the discarded Evian water bottles.
Still, the year 2000 did have some highlights, such as the emergence of plus-sized models Sophie Dahl (daughter of the late Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal) and Mia Tyler (half-sis of Liv, another love child of Steven) as full-bodied, sexy stars, and Sisqo's Thong Song, where we learned that having "dumps like a truck" (translation: nice big butt a la Jennifer Lopez) wasn't such a bad thing.
So what are the rest of us -- those who don't wear Manolo Blahniks, buy $900 Christian Dior purses, or hang out in cool clubs -- to make of all of this?
It's simple, really. When it comes to body image, the whole world has gone mad, mad, mad. If you over-indulged during the holidays, start eating sensibly again. If you're overweight according to your doctor's charts, then ease yourself in to a healthier diet combined with regular exercise.
Whatever you do, don't beat yourself up over all the fun you had, and don't start any crazy fad diet. Strive for health, not thinness. Because every time you come close to society's ideal, someone, somewhere will raise the bar.
Besides, did I mention that hot pants are back this spring?
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