Fat Actress

Sometimes my friends and I have totally normal conversations. How are you? What's new? Did you see they closed Tower Records? Did you hear about the homeless guy who shoves flutes up his nose and plays them while also playing the buckets near Union Square?

You know, the usual.

But sometimes our conversations veer off to so many different tangents that all of a sudden we're talking about how great Mayim Bialik is and I have no clue how we got there.

That's what happened recently while I was talking to Barrett. Now, Mayim happens to be around my age, so I actually DID watch Blossom when it was on, but Barrett is four years older than me, and I'm almost positive she didn't. She may not even have seen Beaches. And I'd bet if she did, she didn't cry when Barbara Hershey was dying. Oops, spoiler on a movie from the 80's!

Anyway, so Barrett and I were talking about Mayim, and she asked if I'd seen the Kirstie Alley series Fat Actress. I hadn't. Barrett told me Mayim plays Kirstie Alley's neighbor in the show and she hates her. This intrigued me, because I knew that had to mean funny, and I'd recently seen Mayim on TLC's What Not to Wear and had just found out Mayim could be funny. Like, truly funny.

However. I was never really a Kirstie Alley fan. When I thought back to Cheers, she always seemed to be hyper and uptight and whiny. When I thought of Look Who's Talking she seemed uptight and hyper. Harried. I didn't really think I'd enjoy Fat Actress.

Peoples, sometimes you should really just trust your friends. I didn't particularly enjoy the first episode of Fat Actress. I found Kirstie Alley to be whiny and annoying. But I was watching through Netflix, so I soldiered on to the second episode. And it all clicked for me. Turns out Kirstie Alley (who both stars in and co-wrote the show) is really funny. There were a lot of guest stars and I totally got into the show.

Just like My So-Called Life, I am very sad Fat Actress was only on air for one season. [insert cool lean against row of lockers while staring up at the ceiling as if thinking deep thoughts all while wearing a one-piece gas station jumpsuit, a la Jordan Catalano who is the only character or person able to pull that look off]

All this to say, you too, should go watch the Fat Actress series. Then we can discuss it. Then we can keep talking, and five minutes later we'll probably be laughing so hard we're about to pee in our pants while talking about unicorns or spatulas or something equally obscure. Because that's how we roll.