I often hear about women who lost significant amounts of weight that they still feel like the fat girl stuck in a skinny body. Even though they suddenly fit into a whole new set of clothes, their head still plays the same old damaging loop of negative thoughts and images. I have the opposite problem. I suffer from the skinny girl in a fat body syndrome. My head still tells me I am fabulous but every now and again I catch my reflection in a mirror or a window and I am completely taken by surprise. The image I see of a woman carrying an extra 25 pounds doesn’t match up with the image I see in my mind’s eye – chic and sassy.
That’s one of the reasons I love the Lifetime series “Drop Dead Diva” – returning for a second season this Sunday night. Brooke Elliott, the show’s star, deftly plays Deb a vapid size 0 model/actress wannabe, who is killed by a grapefruit truck and comes back to life in the body of Jane, a plus size workaholic attorney. Somewhere in Hollywood, at least one person figured out that women aren’t stereotypes. And they play out this realization by melding Deb and Jane’s personalities together. It is almost metaphoric when Jane, now possessed by Deb, opens her closet and trashes all the Lane Bryant poly-blend. She may be large but she will still have style, damnit. And then there’s the scene where Deb, living Jane’s life, discovers she now owns a convertible Mercedes – because having brains pays off.
My favorite moments from Season One were the times Jane would forget she no longer had Deb’s body. She would strut her stuff and she would pull it off, with even more skill than Deb would have, because backing up Jane’s swagger was confidence and personal power, not just starvation and exercise.
At its core, however, “Drop Dead Diva” is still just a sitcom full of standard sitcom ploys – love triangles, cheesy one-liners, a law firm that always wins, and supporting characters that are one-dimensional. But what makes it a must-watch show is that the leading lady is multi-dimensional – chunky, thin, starving, fed, smart, insecure, confident, funny, sad, overworked, sexy – all rolled into one. And that’s how I find most real-life leading ladies to be out here in the real world.
I travel in two crowds. The first is a group of amazing women –feminists who are articulate, engaged and sometimes outraged by the status of women and women’s rights. They are activists, writers, and all around really cool chicks (although some of them might take offense at the term “chicks”). I don’t really spend that much time with them outside of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Google groups. But I admire, respect and relate to them and to many others. 
