Breakfast at Hamptons...Can't Tell A Book From Its Cover!

We All Have Our Prejudices...

I don't want to belabor the point. I do have my own thoughts about fat people. Not overweight, not chubby, not dietetically challenged or husky ( as I was called as a kid! ), but people who, for one reason or another, just can't mix in a salad or two! FAT!

I drew this woman at the Hampton Inn at Arkadelphia, AK at breakfast time and I think I captured her "displacement" and misery pretty well. She didn't look very happy... even while eating breakfast!

"My gosh, I thought to myself, "How can any skeletal support system handle that mass for such a long time?" How does one allow themselves to get that way? She looks as though breathing is even difficult!"

'How horrible is life that you have to eat your sorrows away?"

Twenty minutes into her breakfast, she struggled to get up off the chair and amble back towards the buffet table. Once she did, I turned my sketchbook to a young woman who had just sat down with a cup of coffee and then, somehow lost sight of my original subject. She was gone and it was just as well.

About an hour later, while still sipping coffee and conversing with the staff, I noticed the "whale" checking out of the hotel with the family. The husband was also rather large, but not quite her size and the two little boys were, let's just say, pudgy! Distracted from my conversation with the waitress about drinking coffee in a heat wave ( it was 105 degrees the day before! ), I noticed the boys were acting physically, little strange. On a closer look, as the family walked out of the lobby into the heat of the day, I noticed that this woman was the mother of, not one, but two boys with Down's syndrome. A handful, for sure! I felt horrible and that old adage about the book and its cover rang embarrassingly true.

Every now and then, life kinda slaps you around a bit to remind you what a REAL SNOT you can be and to, not so gently, make you understand that everyone, in their own way, is just trying to make it through the day...with or without that extra donut!