Peggy Platt presents a plus-size show with a heart
This is for all the fat girls.
The skinny ones, too. Men out there, big and small, feel free to tune in as well.
Mostly, though, Peggy Platt has created "Fat Girl Follies: A Really Big Show" for the womanly woman, the girl with a little extra junk in her trunk and curves galore. That's the positive spin. Reality is, many fat women face being stared at, treated differently in public, and sized out of shopping excursions, social functions and romance. Fat people in general have an uphill battle, but for fat women in particular, it's a mountainous climb.
Platt knows. More than an autobiographical endeavor, "Fat Girl Follies" is her way of reaching out to her sisters in fleshiness and the people who know and love them.
"Even for someone like me, there's a certain amount of isolation that goes along with being a fat person," she explained. "One of the things I address is that people think I'm really out there, and in a whole lot of areas of my life, I don't have good self-esteem."
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"Fat Girl Follies," with its half monologue, half sketch format — including original songs by Koch — is supposed to be funny, Platt stressed, but its main point is to make the audience think as Platt tells her story.
Even as she marketed what she calls her "one-and-a-half-woman-show" (she actually has two accomplices, Tove Hansen and chanteuse Kelly Wright), Platt faced sizable challenges. Recently while talking about the show with an acquaintance, she recalled, "I said, `Oh, I'm just finally addressing the weight thing because I've never really done that before.' And the person said, `Well I hope you are addressing it ... because we're all very worried about you.'
"The thing is," she continued, "I know the person came at it in a very caring way. ... But I thought, `How completely presumptuous of you to think that I haven't been addressing it my entire life!' People think that every person that's overweight is in a plastic bubble and we have no idea. It's just amazing."
Particularly because Platt thinks about it a lot. At age 42, she's heard and dealt with a lot of things relating to her weight, from a heavy-duty adolescence to an adulthood with little romance.
Then there's the dieting. She's had her stomach stapled ("I'm proof that it doesn't work for everybody"), subsisted on a liquid diet ("I lost weight, then gained it all back and 10 percent more") and given just about every weight-loss "solution" imaginable a try. Actually, she said, in the midst of discussing diets with Hansen and Wright, "we realized that between the three of us we had done every diet we could think of. Except Jenny Craig."
Once she took those frustrations and put them into the script, word on the "Fat Follies" started to spread. Today Platt has a better idea of just how wide a reach her show may have. A plus-size clothing consignment shop on Capitol Hill, Venus, volunteered most of the wardrobe for the show. Women began stopping Platt on the street with words of encouragement.
"It's a reminder that when you do something good, the universe will provide for you, you know?" she said. "Of course I knew that, because that's why I was writing the show. So it's kind of like I'm going, 'Of course! It's going to affect other people. I'm not the only person who's fat!' "
Melanie McFarland can be reached at mmcfarland@seattletimes.com.