Body Talk Read online

  You don’t need me to tell you this, because anyone who’s ever accidentally opened their photo to the selfie cam when they weren’t expecting it knows—pictures can tell all kinds of cray stories. Oh yes, I was bigger than usual at the time, but it was nothing that was outside my normal “bigger phase” range.

  The photos had just come out and people were coming up to me like, “Oh my God, you look great! How did you lose all that weight in a week?” If they didn’t know that it was damn near impossible for someone to lose forty pounds in seven days, I didn’t consider it my job to enlighten them. I didn’t tell people that I hadn’t lost any weight at all, that it was all in the difference a paparazzi photo can make. I just tried to brush it off and change the subject. “Oh, well, I don’t know . . . but damn, girl, you look fantastic. What type of weave hair are you using these days?”

  Cut to a day later. I was standing in line at the grocery store. (Yes, I shop for my own groceries often.) The woman in front of me was looking at the tabloid magazine covers, then turned around and looked me straight in the eyes. There was no “OMG, Tyra, I can’t believe you do your own grocery shopping!” look on her face. Instead she said, “If they’re calling you fat, what am I?” And she said it through tears.

  That was when it hit me—this whole incident wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t just about me.

  No pun intended, but it was bigger than me. Much bigger.

  I called my Tyra Banks Show producers from the car on the way home. We worked on producing the response-to-the-tabloids show for about a week, and I had intense sessions with my team of producers to bounce ideas off them and figure out exactly what I wanted to say. (Thanks, Lauren Berry-Blincoe and John Redmann!) At first, I was going to end my diatribe by saying, “To everyone who goes around calling me and other women fat, f*ck you!” and flip off the camera. When the show aired, we’d just bleep out my words and blur my hands.

  Then we sat back and realized that we wanted this moment to be more poignant than cursing, and we didn’t want to bleep or blur any part of it out, so we rewrote it. I tried so many different versions, like “Forget you!” or “Kiss my butt,” and even called the Standards and Practices, the censor police of network television. “Can I say ‘ass’ on TV?” I asked.

  We had a winner.

  The day of shooting, I was dressed in my little talk show dress, looking prim and proper. But something felt off. I called out to my stylist, Yaniece, “Do you still have that swimsuit from Australia?”

  “The swimsuit?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the swimsuit.”

  “Girl, yeah. It’s with all that Top Model stuff over there in that suitcase.”

  “Get it out,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I started taking off my clothes.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, looking at me like I was crazier than I already was.

  “Just help me put it on,” I said.

  She helped me yank it up, and I was about ready to exit my dressing room when I thought, “Oh shoot, I may be brave, but I ain’t stupid.” I called over Valente, my longtime makeup artist, who was also on the Australian beach with me, to put some body makeup on my legs, and run some Victoria’s Secret–like shimmer down the front of my thighs (a trick that makes it look like there’s a muscle there when there ain’t).

  Then I walked out the door, straight to the stage.

  When I entered that set in that swimsuit and nothing else, my staff and many of my producers were as shocked as the studio audience.

  Carolyn: I was sitting in my living room in front of the TV, sipping on my daily can of ginger ale, when Tyra strutted onto the set of her talk show sporting the same bathing suit that was plastered on the cover of every gossip magazine around the world.

  Of course, she had told me that she was going to address the paparazzi’s blatant attempt at public humiliation, but not dressed like that! With every sip, I grew more and more proud.

  Tyra: I addressed the audience and was as real and as raw as was humanly possible, and ended it yelling, “Kiss my FAT ass!” Oh, I slapped my own ass super hard when I said “fat,” too. I had wanted the whole speech to be strong, empowering, fierce. But now, as the audience screamed and cheered and teared up and even sobbed, I realized I was crying, too. What the hell? I was just laughing about all of this a week ago. But now, I was feeling weak and vulnerable. WTF?

  I needed to be strong. I needed to be a warrior. I needed to be an example to women everywhere that they could survive this body shaming without letting it break them down. I ran straight to the control booth to my director, Brian.

  “Brian,” I said, wiping snot from my nose. “I started to cry out there. So we gotta do it again. And I want you to end the ‘Kiss my fat ass’ part with a shot close on my face—strong and defiant. There was this woman in the grocery store, and I can’t have her see me all teary. Nobody should see me crying. It’s weak.”

  Brian looked at me—actually, he looked through me—then started walking around the booth, turning off each and every monitor. When he was done, he turned to me and said, “Tyra, go home.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Go home,” he repeated. “Yes, you cried. Yes, you were vulnerable. But it was real. It was you. And I’m not gonna say it again after this. Go. Home.”

  So, I did as he said. I went home. I hardly slept for the next two weeks, until it aired.

  And the day it aired changed my life forever.

  Carolyn: “Kiss my fat ass!” Whew! Those four words that Tyra said—no, yelled—were not what I had expected. But I was overjoyed! By the time she slapped her butt, I had leapt off the couch, spilled ginger ale on my shirt, and had tears rolling down my cheeks. Tyra spoke in defense of all of us who have witnessed or experienced the physical and emotional chains that are forced upon women throughout our lives. It was as if she was screaming in unison with all of our voices: “Enough is friggin’ enough!” The resounding response from women and girls around the planet said it all. We were tired of feeling that we are worth nothing more than what we weigh.

  Tyra: That butt slap was felt everywhere—from beauty salons to office buildings to locker rooms to school playgrounds to damn near every news and online outlet in the darn universe. I saw the gorgeous and talented Adele at an Alicia Keys event and she wrapped her arms around me and thanked me from her beautiful body and soul profusely. Women (and men, too) from all over the world were writing in about how much what I said meant to them. A week later at intermission of the musical Rent in NYC, a woman pulled me aside and said the moment saved her life, that she had a handful of pills but experienced that moment and immediately called a suicide hotline that ended up saving her life. Time magazine named me one of the most influential people of the year next to Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Richard Branson (and in the Heroes and Pioneers category, no less). And the speech made it onto TV Guide Magazine’s 60 Greatest Talk Show Moments list.

  I had no idea it would lead to all of that. But I realized it had this impact because it was a real moment. At the time I taped it, I thought real meant polished. A do-over. Perfection. But if I had delivered that speech how I wanted to—cool and calculated, and yeah, 100 percent “strong,” like I wasn’t bothered one bit by people calling me fat—it would not have resonated the powerful way it did.

  I believe in those words that I said on my talk show just as much today as I did when I first said them, more than ten years ago. And just in case you weren’t there back then to experience the moment, and even if you were, I’ve brought it here . . . to you:

  I love my mama. She has helped me to be a strong woman so I can overcome these kind of attacks, but if I had lower self-esteem, I would probably be starving myself right now. But, that’s exactly what is happening to other women all over this country. So, I have something to say to all of you that have something nasty to say about me or other women
who are built like me . . . women whose names you know, women whose names you don’t, women who’ve been picked on, women whose husbands put them down, women at work or girls in school—I have one thing to say to you: Kiss my fat ass!

  Carolyn: This epic moment was a culmination of all that I had worked so hard to instill in Tyra. She had sprouted her own wings and was flying high.

  Fat ass and all.

  This piece was previously published in Perfect Is Boring by Tyra Banks and Carolyn London.

  Teeth. Hair. Birthmarks. Moles.

  We can see these things because they’re superficial, on the surface of our bodies. Sure, we might be able to straighten teeth or cut hair. We can hide birthmarks and moles with clothing or makeup. But what do they mean on a deeper level?

  These features can make our bodies unique and fascinating as much as they can make our bodies annoying or frustrating. They tell stories that go far beyond what’s seen. They tell us about who we are, as well as where we come from.

  The Ghosts of Christmas Past, or When the Angel Learned to Shave

  by Eric Smith

  The year I became an angel was the year I started to shave.

  It was during the Year of the Preteen Mustache that some casting directors from Broadway came to my inner-city school to do some outreach and look for young talent. They’d asked some kids a few years prior to be in the chorus of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so hopes were very high among me and my band-, chorus-, and theater-geek friends that we might be picked to be a part of a show, too. I mean, the kids who went on to be in that musical were so cool. We got to go on a class trip to see them once! They were, like, famous!

  They weren’t. But I was eleven. I didn’t know better.

  The details that led to me and several of my friends being cast as angels in the original Broadway production of A Christmas Carol aren’t terribly interesting. There was an audition, followed by weeks of waiting. There were a lot of late-night rehearsals, from which my mom and other parents picked me and my pals up at midnight. Then there were costume fittings in New York City, big white fluffy outfits full of glitter and sequins. Dress rehearsals with bright lights and smoke machines. Passionate musical directors pushing this legion of eleven- and twelve-year-old kids to behave professionally, and the school’s chorus directors, two teachers who stared at us with the kind of pride that comes only with this kind of success.

  There was even a recording studio, where we all crammed in and sang our collective hearts out for a Nobody Beats the Wiz commercial (I realize some of you readers might not even be aware of that former retail giant) and the original Broadway soundtrack.

  That’s right. Somewhere in the bowels of your favorite used record store’s twenty-five-cent bin of soundtracks on CDs, you might be able to find me singing on a few hot tracks.

  As the opening night grew closer and photos became more frequent, I grew increasingly insecure about walking across that stage. In the show, the entire cast of angels would hold hands as we made our way across downstage, standing in front of all the actors, sparkling under the lights to sing our big song. But I couldn’t stop thinking about my face. Teachers never said anything to me about it, and none of my friends did either, but I could feel it. In their side glances and narrow-lipped smiles. Something about me, the way I looked, was wrong.

  “Dad. Dad, I need to shave!” I exclaimed. “I’m supposed to be an angel.” Dress rehearsals were in full swing, and opening night was a little under a week away.

  “You’ll be fine,” my mom said. “You’re already an angel.” Yes, my mother actually talked like this, and still does.

  “Mom! No! I need to—”

  “All right, that does it. Upstairs.” My dad huffed, getting up from the kitchen table.

  Armed with one of those single-blade Bic razors—this was long before the era of the Gillette razors that sound like weapons from a bad fantasy novel, Mach Fusion 6: The Razor of a Thousand Blades—my dad lathered some shaving foam on my upper lip. I stared at the mirror, catching my mom behind us, having herself a good cry. I’d learn this would become a tradition, my mother crying over every major life moment.

  Graduating from junior high.

  Graduating from high school.

  Graduating from being an eleven-year-old with a mustache to an eleven-year-old who had to start shaving because he was appearing as an angel in a Broadway musical.

  You know, traditional benchmarks for parenting.

  I remember being anxious that evening after shaving for the very first time, lying in bed and singing songs from the musical loudly and likely driving my parents and little sister mad. I was excited because I couldn’t wait for that first show and because we had school the next day, and here I was, with a new face. Surely with a new face, I was a new person. It felt like a fresh start. How many bullied eleven-year-olds get a fresh start?

  Turns out I didn’t get one. Everyone made fun of me.

  “You shaved!?” A girl (whose name I remember but won’t mention here, because I’m a better person than you, BRIANA) mocked me on the playground. “You’re a freak.”

  I couldn’t win. I couldn’t. I spent that week being made fun of on the playground and in the hallways and at Boy Scouts and on the bus . . . and as opening night of A Christmas Carol grew closer, my mustache slowly came back in.

  Due to my genetics, a blend of Palestinian, Sicilian, and Honduran, I was blessed with this mustache at the ripe old age of eleven. I’m not talking about a little bit of peach fuzz here. No, this was a legit mustache, like something a freshman might try and fail to grow their first year of college. It was noticeable, and not something that could be hidden under Broadway stage makeup.

  I got picked on a lot, for more reasons than just the hair. For looking the way I did, having not only the facial hair but a birthmark that marred the right side of my jawline. For having an unusually simple name as an adopted brown kid, thus frequently raising questions among people who didn’t know me. Oh, and for the way I dressed. My parents had a knack for clothing me in single-color sweatshirts and pants, earning me the nickname “the Purple Wolf” from a few older kids, thanks to a set of bright purple sweats that still haunt me to this day.

  I complained to my parents a lot about the mocking and the bullying that happened in the classroom, in Boy Scouts, and in other after-school activities. And my parents were great at telling me exactly the wrong thing to say.

  One time, when some of these same older kids asked me about all my body hair (my arms and legs are . . . significantly covered) and my mustache while shoving me around a bit in the lunchroom, I looked one of them in the eye and said, “Someday when you’re a man, you’ll understand.”

  My mom had told me to say that.

  And when I think about that now, I can appreciate that my mother was a master of the burn and that she meant well.

  I got my ass kicked.

  Post-shave, with the mustache temporarily gone from my face, things hadn’t gotten better. And when the musical finally premiered, it was hard to truly enjoy it.

  The months we were on Broadway, I wrestled with insecurity. Some days I had the mustache, because as I quickly learned as a hairy eleven-year-old, I was destined to be one of those people who had to shave every single day, the hair on my face growing back faster than weeds on the sidewalk. Other days I took the time to shave, my dad standing next to me and keeping a watchful eye while I did it, giving me little pieces of paper towel every time I cut myself.

  It was an era that was meant to be one of the greatest moments of my young life. Performing on a Broadway stage, with a handful of friends who are still some of my closest to this day. The trips to New York City every other day, on fancy charter buses. The way my family beamed when talking about this accomplishment, especially my mother. She would light up like the Christmas trees we drove by in Manhattan.

  But
to this day, when I hear kids singing Christmas music as the holidays draw near—those choruses of children—it takes me thundering back.

  Suddenly I’m a kid on a bus, full of panic and wondering if I’m ugly or not. Burying my eyes in video game magazines with my best friend, Miguel, hearing the laughter at the back of the bus and wondering if it is about me. Squinting down at the Broadway audience, hoping no one is staring at my facial hair. Wondering if there’s something wrong with me, an overly hairy boy who can’t decide whether to shave that day and whether to wear glasses during the show.

  Just trying so very hard to figure out the right combination of things will make me feel better about myself when thousands of people are watching me sing under beaming stage lights, sequins on my costume shimmering, night after night.

  Those body issues remained with me for a long time, and I fought them for years.

  I purposefully didn’t wear my glasses, making my eyes worse. I shaved almost every single day from junior high until I was nearly thirty, occasionally growing the poor-choice goatee. In high school, I once grew a beard and dyed the ends blond, red, and blue. I irritated the hell out of my skin, both from shaving and from bleaching my facial hair. The chemicals on my face led to awful breakouts, and shaving on that sensitive skin led to razor bumps that still grace my face two decades later. But none of that stopped me. I thought maybe if I just ignored all of that or kept pushing to transform how I looked, to alter my face, I somehow might be happier. Might be accepted.

  If I put on a show.

  I feel like I spent years as that kid on that stage. Trying to be what I thought an audience wanted, wrestling with my appearance. Glasses, no glasses. Beard, no beard. I filled most aspects of my life with a desperate need to be liked. To be seen. I was in all the plays in high school and even pushed ahead as a theater major in college. I played in bands. I wanted to know that all of this—you can’t see it, but I’m gesturing at my face—was OK.