---

---

I still wonder why George was so interested in my 13-year-old body. I still wonder why an adult in his thirties would choose to spend several hours a week coaching baton and dance. But mostly, I still wonder why he got so upset the day I brought four hard-boiled eggs to practice.

George was the assistant coach to a baton and dance team of about twenty girls and women ranging in age from 12 to 24. We had sparkly costumes, which was half the reason I joined. I am from the garden part of the Garden State, but it’s still New Jersey. Any hobby requiring big hair, big makeup, and big sequins was bound to attract me like a moth to a chemical factory fire.

The team was associated with the strip mall dance academy we all attended. We met in the parking lots and rented gymnasiums of rural New Jersey to practice routines choreographed to songs like Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” (a song about fucking) or “Dim All the Lights” (also by Summer, also a song about fucking) and a ‘90s cover of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” (more fucking). Along with our head coach Amanda, a funny, charismatic ex-twirling champion who presumably chose all the songs about fucking, George guided us through the dance moves and baton tricks performed in time to the songs about fucking: fan kicks, illusions, one-spins, two-spins, three-spins, seven-spins, and much more.

I don’t know where George was from, or what he did when not coaching baton twirlers. I never knew his precise age, his sexual orientation, his relationship status, his income level, his educational background, or his coaching CV. I just know that he was presented as “Amanda’s old friend,” and we left it at that. I recall him as something of a mashup of Corky St. Clair from “Waiting for Guffman” and a bargain-basement Bela Karolyi.

I was among the younger team members, and was probably second to last in terms of talent. I wasn’t very coordinated and had trouble picking out the beat. George noticed my trouble early on and kindly taught me alternate methods to stay on beat and in sync with the team. Learning to use cues made a huge difference, and George was of great help. He encouraged my grit and determination. What he did not encourage was the consumption of anything that might cause me to gain weight.

It wasn’t just me. We were all encouraged to cut down on calories during competition season so we’d look more “streamlined,” a term I first heard in third grade when I did a report on bottlenose dolphins. My mom had the report bound using some of her library tools, and it was really neat. I got a good grade, too. But ours was not a team of dolphins.

The team was mostly, but not entirely, white women and girls, with bodies of various shapes and sizes. Some looked like elite gymnasts — tiny and muscular, with flat chests and a very low body-fat percentage — but most ran the gamut: curvier, thinner, taller, shorter, narrow hips, wide hips, big butts, medium butts, flat butts, big feet, little feet, medium size feet A few of the bigger girls called themselves “fat” with pride or shame or neutrality, depending on the individual. 

Mine was not a feminist household or one concerned with celebrating body diversity. I had a mother who constantly complained about her weight and a godmother who followed suit. I thought they both looked great just as they were, but learned not to push back at their self-criticism, which I gleaned was some form of mysterious bonding over a decade before Mean Girls so aptly satirized this poisonous activity. I didn’t have much awareness of how my body appeared to the outside world, although my breasts were already large and attracting unwanted attention from adult men who yelled at me on the street or followed me in their cars. The groping by adult strangers wouldn’t commence until I was in the eighth grade, but I already had begun to sense that my body did not exactly belong to me.

We were all encouraged to cut down on calories during competition season so we’d look more “streamlined,” a term I first heard in third grade when I did a report on bottlenose dolphins.

Fortunately, I had recently found my way to Sassy magazine at the local newsstand, which provided a beautifully weird response to the standard garbage from women’s magazines. Thanks to a middle school friend, I had been introduced to Margaret Cho’s jokes about sexism and prejudice in mainstream media and her stories about being told she was too big to be on TV. And I recall thinking it was bizarre that the tabloids and pop culture commentators seemed so obsessed with the appearances of First Lady Hillary Clinton or TV stars like Oprah and Delta Burke and Roseanne. Why did it matter?

This was ultimately the question I asked myself about our coaches’ interest in weight: why did it matter? It was evident to me that one’s body shape and size did not correspond to one’s ability to perform the routines well or with stage presence. It was also clear that my teammates, regardless of size, had the ability to bring home trophies. It was obvious that the coaches knew the aforementioned two facts. Therefore, this weigh-in thing was an utterly pointless waste of time.

From the moral and logical perspectives, my seventh-grade brain could not see the motivation. At 13, I thought this was somehow all about winning trophies. Now, at 41, I wonder if the exercise had more to do with keeping us in line, with reminding us to participate in the timeless American ritual of finding our physical selves inadequate so that we would buy things to make us feel better about our bodies or products to shrink them. I do not think that Amanda and George had malevolent intent, or even considered what this might do to the girls and women under their tutelage. But by not thinking critically and by doing what, perhaps, their own coaches had done, they played their part very well, indeed.

* * * * *

The hard-boiled egg incident took place during one of our extra-long summer rehearsals, all-day events that took place in un-air-conditioned gyms. I opened my lunchbox to reveal four hard-boiled eggs, a couple of pretzel sticks, and some carrots. George walked by, peeked into the box, and looked at me like I’d announced my intent to perform a bloodletting ritual using the body of our most talented twirler in order to summon a demon.

“Do you know how much fat is in those?” he demanded, staring at the eggs and then at me. He looked angry.

An eager-to-please do-gooder, I was confused and scared. Had I missed the lesson on the evils of hard-boiled eggs? Had 20/20 or 60 Minutes or Oprah recently denounced them as poisonous? Was George concerned about my arterial plaque? 

Panicked though I was, I quickly surmised that this was not, in fact, about heart health or hard-boiled albumin toxicity but about weight. He had said fat, and I knew from 1990s TV news and women’s magazines that when you ate fat, you became fat. Fat was not streamlined and therefore ran counter to our collective mission. And because it was against the goal of the team, I had done something wrong. I had betrayed my sacred duty to become a bottlenose dolphin in sequins.

George was never angry when I couldn’t keep time to the music or stay on beat. He was empathetic, helpful, and encouraging. He didn’t get mad when I dropped the baton in competition. But he was evidently furious that I was eating a meal that he deemed too fatty.

And so a seventh-grader brought some hard-boiled eggs to lunch during an eight-hour practice session and got scolded by a man in his thirties who thought that was part of his job, who thought he was doing the right thing, or who just wanted to yell at a kid for something because he was in a mood. I guess I’ll never know.

We did very well that year, competing up and down the East Coast in our sequins and bright red lipstick, twirling flags in time to the music, wielding shiny phallic batons, and always, always, always smiling. 

That summer, the team schlepped from New Jersey to South Bend, Indiana, on a bus to compete at the National Baton Twirling Association’s annual championship series, known as America’s Youth on Parade. It was common to say a prayer for success at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame, which prominently features a wax model of the body of a little dead girl named Saint Severa. They still keep her bones in lead boxes beneath the dummy. At thirteen, I wondered if the pieces of her body were meant to attract extra attention from the Lord to those of us in the basilica. Would her broken, martyred body make Him likelier to hear our prayers?

Thanks to Saint Severa, God, Amanda, George, and our hard work, we won nearly every category at nationals, our greatness cemented in the shadow of the mural they call Touchdown Jesus. Amanda coached us to be gracious winners, but George did not seem to heed this lesson. He made a wisecrack that one of the other team captains should have a beeping alert on her ass to warn everyone when she backed it up.

I wanted George to like me, and I wanted to feel part of something, and I wanted the other girls to think I was fun and funny, so I laughed along with everybody else, but felt uneasy. Why is this grown man remarking on a teen girl’s body? Why does he care? She looked fine to me. Everybody looked fine to me. I was still operating under the assumption that your body was your business, but doubt was beginning to gnaw at the edges of that childhood belief.

We went home tired but happy, with trophies aplenty. But when I started eighth grade and we returned to our regular practice schedule, my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I didn’t want to march in parades, not even if we got to do the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I didn’t care about competitions. I didn’t need the validation of high marks from judges. I didn’t get any deep artistic fulfillment from tossing a baton in the air and hoping I’d catch it. And I didn’t particularly feel like dealing with George, or “invitations” to weigh in. So I quit.

* * * * *

George was the first man who took a critical interest in what I ate and how I looked, but he wasn’t the last. I think of the old high school acquaintance I met for dinner when I moved to New York, who eyed my food and told me to be careful with what I ate because a lot of girls get fat when they move to the city. I think of the guy I dated in my thirties who told me my body would be perfect if I stayed the same weight but grew a couple of inches taller. He trapped me in his room once and would not let me leave. He was angry at me, and thus my body was not my own. It became my own again in the morning, when he wasn’t mad anymore.

I think of the emails and social media messages I get from strange men asking why I’ve gained weight, why I’ve lost weight, why I was semi-nude in that project, why I don’t get naked more often when I act. I think of the ones from strange women who tell me I’m getting too small, I’m too big to wear this or that, I’m so brave to wear that when my body is that size, I’m not big enough to write about the unsolicited physical critiques I receive, I’m so brave for writing about the unsolicited physical critiques I receive, and on and on and on. I am not a celebrity and will never understand why one random woman’s existence can elicit such responses.

I am also aware that I walk with abundant privilege. The attention I receive does not touch the level of body-shaming, harassment, and cruelty that other women, especially many women of color, endure online and on the street.

Part of me feels fortunate to have gotten to wait until I was 13 before I felt the first shred of my bodily autonomy being torn away. So many children know from early days that society sees their bodies as threats to be tamed or eliminated. If I had been physically bigger, or of a darker skin tone, or in a body that presented as disabled, or from a working-class or poor household, it’s likely I would’ve awoken much earlier to the reality that began to dawn in the 7th grade.

---