Body, Beautiful!

"You can never be too rich or too thin" is now only half true, since the international fashion world has red-flagged ultra-thin models. The iconic Giorgio Armani even had to issue a statement disclaiming responsibility for setting famished waifs as the runway standard.

So is fat finally in?

Not quite, but it turns out that it isn’t really a crime to have a body that’s more than thin, and the planets will not collide in a modern day Big Bang if you can’t–no matter how long and hard you try to hold your breath and tuck in your tummy–fit into a size Small.

Women of all sizes–and the men who love them–are invited to share the travails of the female species’ "tortured relationships with our weight, body image and self-acceptance" when the New Voice Company presents this week-end "The Good Body," a monologue a trois that takes a hilarious and provocative look at what it really means to have a "good body."

The New York Times calls the play "forthrightly funny, bristling with wisecracks and exotically harvested snippets of wisdom."

Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation "The Vagina Monologues," takes aim this time at the totality of a woman’s body, and relates it to her perception of self. "In the fifties," she writes, "girls were pretty, perky. They wore girdles and waist cinchers... In recent years, good girls climb the corporate ladder, go to the gym, wear pointy, painful shoes... They don’t eat too much. They don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin." Her conslusion? "I could never be good."

Ensler again applies her keen ear for dialogue and lets a gallery of women from all over the world, from all professions and persuasions, speak about something that is most personal to them–their own bodies: how they love it/hate it, break it/fix it, give it/take it.

For the rest of us who resort to saying–by way of consuelo de bobo–that "thin is relative," we may relate to the various characters that Ensler has written into "The Good Body" who will be given voice by three of the Philippine stage’s strongest presence. In changing roles, Monique Wilson, Pinky Amador and Juno Henares speak for women from Los Angeles to Kabul, thin women, not-so-thin women, never-thin-enough women and others in places between.

Monique, just back from London where she is now based, plays an aging magazine executive still haunted by her mother’s criticisms, a model whose plastic surgeon husband systematically reconstructs her, a Jewish woman who had to go through vaginal tightening as a gift to her husband, an Italian girl who has her huge breasts removed as a reaction to incest, and an African mother who celebrates each individual body as a sign of Nature’s diversity.

Juno takes on roles including a Latin woman who candidly critiques the stubborn layer of fat that she calls "a second pair of thighs," a tattoo artist who justifies mutilating her body, Isabella Rosellini who got fired as spokesperson for cosmetics company Lancome when she turned 40, a teenager who was sent to fat camp, and an Indian woman who absolutely delights in her curves.

The two actresses also play a pair of Afghan women willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream.

Narrating the whole play is Pinky as Eve Ensler, who traverses the path of transformation from pain and obsession to inspiration and enlightenment.

"It has nothing to do with your body," Pinky tells STARweek from Camarines Sur where she was wakeboarding, on a break before going into final rehearsals for "The Good Body." "It’s about self-image."

It’s about women constantly seeking re-affirmation–of their value, their worth–on the path not of self-love but of self-acceptance. Pinky shares a realization that Ensler had after years of performing "The Vagina Monologues": "I’ve said vagina so many times... And then I realized that the self-hatred crept up from my vagina to my stomach..."

Pinky, who after "The Good Body" is having a come-back solo concert on November 30 at Teatrino in Promenade Greenhills, shares that she has gone to "both extremes"–on one hand doing alcohol and cigarettes, keeping an unhealthy schedule and unhealthy diet, and on the other hand sticking to a disciplined lifestyle of diet and exercise and, at one point, tipping the scales at a mere 102 pounds–but is now happily in a "great middle place." She admits to having undergone some cosmetic enhancing procedures, but "nothing invasive." How far is she willing to go? "I don’t know" is her honest answer.

In this day when huge billboards and glossy photo spreads scream out an ideal of how women should look–or should want to look–and advertisements offer a plethora of products and procedures that promise to make you reach that ideal, we all need a pointed statement–a wake up call, if you will–that it’s okay to be who we are, no matter what size or shape; that less is not always better; that PhotoShop on the computer can easily make you look like that flawless, cellulite-less model in the glossy (PhotoShop probably made her look like that anyway); that having that extra scoop of ice cream or piece of cake may only mean that tomorrow there will be more of you to love; and that really, it is about time we learn to love the "good bodies" that we have right here, right now.

The Good Body goes on stage at the Music Museum in Greenhills on Nov. 10 and 11 at 9 pm. Tickets available at the New Voice Company (tel 896-5497) and Ticketworld outlets.