New York Magazine Story (4)

My Life as a Thin Person (cont.)

Alison Show lost 130 pounds. (Photo credit: Danielle Levitt)

If competently done, all three of these methods boast reasonably good long-term success rates. A comprehensive survey in the October 13, 2004, issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association reports dramatic reductions not just in weight but diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, and obstructive sleep apnea; attend any support-group meeting, and you’ll also hear story after story about the restoration of simple dignity: being able to fly without seat-belt extensions, shop in any old store, tie one’s shoes, cross one’s legs, pick oneself up after falling down. One woman, a patient of Ren’s, described the first time she was able to wrap and tuck a hotel towel around her body. It’s hard, here, to replicate the mixture of incredulity and gratitude in her voice.

But all bariatric surgeries also require a lifetime of vitamin and mineral supplements, which some patients ignore. Sensualists should be warned: Some people can never eat meat again; others can’t tolerate pasta or bread. And some replace one form of addiction with another. Cynthia Buffington, the director of research at U.S. Bariatric in Fort Lauderdale, says that about 30 percent of its patients convert a penchant for overeating into alcohol dependence.

Perhaps most critical, bariatric surgeries are high-risk. Most responsible surgeons won’t even countenance the idea unless a patient is 100 pounds too heavy or more. One in 200 patients dies within 30 days of gastric-bypass surgery, by far the most common procedure; one in 100 dies from the duodenal switch, the most radical. Gastric banding, the least mutilating procedure, is by far the safest, with a mortality rate of just 0.1 percent. Unfortunately, it also seems to be the least effective. Gastric-banding patients can tolerate liquid foods far more easily than others, making ice cream a tempting alternative when little else goes down.

A 1991 study in The American Journal of Surgery also contains some interesting data about the mental-health effects of bariatric surgery. In the first six months, patients reported they were ecstatic. But after two years, most were back to where they started, at least in the aggregate. The crude explanation for this, says Walter Pories, one of the study’s authors and a surgeon at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, is that real life once again begins to reassert itself, and the trials of real life aren’t always things that skinniness can cure: bad jobs, neglectful spouses, rebellious children, faces and bodies that turn out only ho-hum. The more interesting mental-health discovery he and his colleagues made, Pories says, were the effects the surgery had on people’s marriages. “If the woman married when she was thin, had kids, became obese, and then had the surgery, the marriage almost always got a lot better,” he explains. (An estimated 75 percent of all bariatric patients are female.) “But if the woman married someone while she was obese and then became pretty . . . well, then she found a job. Got her colors done. Felt better about herself. And almost every one of those marriages ended in divorce.”

“Here I am in Anything Goes,” says Alison Show, flipping through a pile of photographs from recent summer-stock productions. “And this is me in Oklahoma . . . ”

The day I first speak to Alison Show, Deborah Voigt, the international opera star, is smiling on the front page of the New York Times, admitting she had gastric-bypass surgery. It’s a funny coincidence. Though a musical-theater freak in college, Show chose to major in opera, precisely because it was the one medium in which her five-foot-two, 260-pound frame wouldn’t be held against her. Then, at 23, she was cast as the lead in Massenet’s Cendrillon. Her costume arrived and didn’t fit. The director was furious. She called her mother that night, telling her she’d decided to have bypass surgery. Today, at 26, she’s half her old weight and living in New York, attempting to become an actress.

“When you’re obese and relationships don’t go well, you could blame it on, ‘Well, nobody loves a fat girl.’ If you’re thin and can’t ﬁnd a boyfriend or get married, what do you blame it on?”

“And here I am as Sarah Good in The Crucible,” she continues. “These are all of the opportunities I never would have had as a heavy person.”

Yet in speaking to Show, one wonders if opera was still the more forgiving medium. “When I go to auditions for musicals,” she says, “I look at myself compared to these girls. They all have huge boobs, they’re all a size 4, they all put on their leotards and bounce around. And I’m thinking, I’ve waited three hours for this cattle call, and there are 300 people in this room who are younger than me, look better, and can sing and act as well as I can.”

Nor does Show, a boop-a-doop cutie with a strong jaw and perfect forties hairdo, yet have any conception of how to play ingenues and temptresses, the main staples of the Broadway stage for 26-year-olds. She harks back to college, when she was cast as the lead in The Magic Flute. “There was no way to conjure any kind of sexual emotion within me,” she says. “I’m just starting to realize the power of sex and that kind of persona—from getting free drinks to just getting someone to let you walk into the subway ahead of them.”

Show says she enjoys the attention. But she also happens to be married—to a 130-pound pianist and composer she’s known since grade school. “It’s been hard,” she says. “My husband and I are still making adjustments. I used to be funnier in social situations. I used to be more academically focused. Now, working out is very important to me, whereas my husband does very little exercise. My image is a priority. Going out and experiencing life in the evening is a priority.” She stops herself. “I am a completely different person from the person he fell in love with.”

So what’s the glue?

“Our parents knew each other,” she says. “We had the same circle of friends. Our upbringing was very similar; we both try to keep Christ at the center of our lives.

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