Word: graded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When I was six years old I knew that ice cream was somehow connected to the undesirable roundness of my post-toddler tummy. And since the fifth grade, when my family switched to frozen yogurt on the occasion of my parents' first cholesterol tests, I've been aware of the less "fattening" alternatives. I don't mean that I was obsessing about these things as early as that. That was a later phase, starting around the seventh grade. Only that I've been semi-consciously stockpiling health information for most of my life. It's gotten to the point that...
...would we be if we could have that time and energy back? My friends and I and, according to a statistic I've heard, the 90 percent of fifth grade girls who diet? I'm not saying we would've written the great American novel--although it's rather nice to think so. It's just that it's such a waste, such a terrible waste. We are, for the most part, no fatter or thinner than we were when we started out, despite our neurotic attention to the matter. We may gain and lose a little weight here...
...Three to Tango is a piece of pure-grade Hollywood cotton candy. Initially light and wispy, the film goes down easily until it grows a little too sticky, a little too sweet, and a little too nausea-friendly. It's pleasantly diverting, but it's also thoroughly disposable and bound to flitter out of your mind ten minutes after leaving the theater. It's a bit of a shame, because Three to Tango could have been a sweetly agreeable bit of fluff if its story wasn't so darn predictable. The film offers up a fairly tired plot, but then...
...Wait for us," Carrie cries after them. She and Beth run to catch up. Both in tenth grade, both shouldering black courier bags that bang against their legs as they hurry, both planning to get drunk this weekend, the two have been best friends since May. An adamant vegan, Carrie wears her blondish hair in dreads and her jeans safety-pinned close to her legs. Her eyes are rimmed with liner and when she speaks, it's in a voice much younger than her words. Beth has pink hair, purple hair, green hair, blue hair, studs up the sides...
...brother's cut-rate encyclopedia, suspiciously slim volumes that I would ransack for sixth-grade book report roughage, featured an innovative learning tool under the entry on the Human Body: seven consecutive pages of transparencies, each devoted to a different organic system. Page 1's skin'n'hair'n'nails fit neatly over Page 2's spindly circulation road map which in turn lay on Page 3's inexplicably adipose-yellow GI tracts or Halloween skeleton man, and so on. At a glance, you saw and saw through man instantly, as through, yes, X-ray specs, a three-dimensional simultaneity...