Guerrilla Public Service: The Man Who Would Be Caltrans

"Oh," I said, "I was beginning to think I had stumbled into a kids' store."

She didn't laugh. Neither did I.

This is the second time this has happened to me in this city in two years. Nowhere else have I had this experience, not in New York, certainly, where I've shopped in Nolita boutiques with far less apprehension than in Los Angeles; not even in Paris, where the women are as slender as whippets. Though, you never know, maybe the French clerks are actually silently laughing Mon Dieu, c'est incroyable every time my ENORMOUSLY FAT ASS, an ass SO ENORMOUS, SO ELEPHANTINE it could never ever possibly FIT into anything REMOTELY fashionable, walks -- no, make that WADDLES -- through the front door. And then I think: What does it mean when a women's clothing store only displays its 0's and 2's and 4's and maybe even the errant size 6, leaving its apparently shaming 8's, 10's and (mon Dieu) its 12's discreetly tucked away in the back? Do these stores think that 0's and 2's would be offended by the very sight of, say, a pair of size-10 extra-low-rise jeans? Offended that a store such as this, a store this fashionable, this hip, this young, would insult its customers with the implication that they, too, either have -- or one day might have -- an ass so large and cushionlike that, in the mortal words of Spinal Tap, it's better for pushin'? I'm not sure. So I left the store and went home, whereupon I immediately, and without a trace of regret, poured myself a 200-calorie glass of red wine, and then another. As K. says, at least we'll always have Paris.

Yours in struggle against oppression and size-2 Earl Jeans,

Manohla Dargis