Sunday, Nov. 7, 1999 | 10:05 a.m.
They've heard the jokes. But forgive them for not laughing.
She's so big, when she sits around the house, she REALLY sits around the house.
I saw Ann Wilson from the rock band Heart on TV the other day. She gives new meaning to the term "heavy metal."
But spend a little time with members of Living Large in Las Vegas and suddenly jokes that feed Phyllis Diller's stand-up act seem more insensitive than funny.
"There's a lot of snickering, a lot of pointing that happens in our lives," said Living Large founder Eileen Simonian, dressed in a robe, curlers and facial cream for the club's recent Halloween party. "There have been jokes. Lots of them."
And snappy one-liners aren't always the cruelest form of derision. A former member was told she would have to purchase two seats for a cross-country flight -- this was during a layover halfway through her flight, after she'd already bought a single ticket with no such surcharge for size.
The old bait and switch, in other words.
Hatred is common as well. Simonian sadly relates the story of a former club member who went shopping at a local health-food store. The woman, a commodities trader popular with club members, happened to be overweight.
"She went shopping for, I don't know, 20 minutes," Simonian said. "She came back and there was this note on her windshield that said, 'You're the fattest, ugliest bitch I've ever seen and you should go kill yourself.' Who would do something like that?"
A miserable Kate Moss fan, I guess. Not all methods of harassment are as overt or unnerving. Some are even comical.
"I was walking through the Forum Shops at Caesars one time and I felt something hit me in the rump," Living Large member Lynnette Owens said. "Granted, I do have a pretty big rump, so I ignored it. But then I felt it again and I turned around and saw this Asian couple, and this Asian gentleman was poking me in the rump with a cane.
"I turned around and said, 'Excuse me!' They got this look on their faces like Godzilla was coming after them."
Touche.
By its own mission statement, Living Large is "a singles group for large and lovely people, their admirers and friends." Living Large meets regularly, on the first Tuesday of every month at Peppers Lounge on the corner of East Desert Inn and Pecos and the fee is a paltry $20 per year (to contact the club, call 585-2425). The Living Large membership stands at around 100, although around 20 manage to make functions regularly.
The organization was formed six years ago by Simonian, who moved to Las Vegas from Sherman Oaks, Calif., after the 1994 Northridge earthquake destroyed her apartment complex. A divorced mother of a grown son and daughter, she now manages a gift shop in Las Vegas.
Simonian ran a similar club in Southern California and noticed an absence of a large-person social club when she arrived in Las Vegas. Confident there was a sizable population of disaffected, overweight Las Vegans, Simonian placed ads in weekly newspapers and waited for the phone to ring.
"The first question I always get is, 'Is there a weight limit?,' " Simonian said. "No, we don't put anyone on a scale."
The club's message is unmistakably defiant: We won't let society dictate our lifestyles.
"The majority of Americans are overweight and there is no single reason for that," Simonian said. "There are many, many reasons."
Several members are simply emotionally exhausted after the repeated cycle of losing and gaining weight. Some, like Simonian, were of average size until giving birth. Others give the age-old glandular or metabolical explanations, saying, "We do not sit around and just pig out," but the reasons have been rendered irrelevant. Club members long ago accepted the reality that they are overweight.
"This is who I am. I'm a big person," club member Mary Hastings said. "I'm not in denial."
That's not true of every person who has filtered through the club in the past six years. There's one male yo-yo who went through weight-loss procedures of liposuction and rib removal while still a Living Large member.
Weeks later, he joined another organization -- a club for singles without partners.
"He's a club-joining kind of guy," Simonian said with a laugh. "Who knows? Maybe he'll come back again when he's big."
Although Living Large is promoted as a club for singles, it's not a "swingers" organization. A few short-term members -- almost always men, as it turns out -- have joined specifically because they have a latent fetish for large members of the opposite sex. They usually leave disappointed after learning that the club's regular functions include pool tournaments, bowling, a monthly dinner and low-key holiday parties.
"They say, 'You're into bowling?' It's kind of sad," Simonian said.
Yet not all members are heavy. A small minority (again, men) are not overweight. One Living Large member, carpenter Ed Klein, joined with his wife soon after the club started.
He's now divorced. But he remains one of the club's most devoted members.
"I can't gain weight at all, no matter what I do or how much I eat. I guess it's because I'm active in my job, but it really doesn't matter," Klein said. "People in this club seem to be not as judgmental, more open-minded. People are constantly being labeled, but that doesn't happen here. It makes it easy to meet people and to talk and make new friends."
The club does struggle with health issues related to carrying extra pounds. A recent study by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the number of deaths related to obesity has risen 15 percent in the past decade to around 300,000.
But Simonian is not a proponent of bad health.
"I think everyone should be healthy and eat right," she said. "Keep active. Do what you can to stay healthy, both physically and mentally."
The mental, even psychological, approach is the key. Simonian sometimes finds herself playing the role of amateur counselor. Fear of the unknown, or of simply mustering the courage to join any social organization, is common among potential Living Large members.
"A lot of times I find myself encouraging people to come out, or to make our regular meetings," Simonian said. "Some people are really afraid of doing anything but going to work and going home and being depressed."
Living Large is not an activist organization, but there is a sense that society's infatuation with physical appearance is itself becoming unhealthy. Why else would actors like Courtney Cox-Arquette and Calista Flockhart, to name two, choose to look like coat racks?
"It's a type of brainwashing," Simonian said. "We just want to recondition the thinking of some people. The pendulum has swung so that people are realizing it's not healthy to be too skinny. I look at Calista Flockhart, and she's emanciated. But she doesn't seem to realize it, and that's a form of denial as far as I'm concerned."
Above all, the recurring theme in Living Large is comfort. Members repeatedly speak of the comfort level they feel in each other's company.
"I don't know if this is the best analogy, but it's the one I like to use," Hastings said. "It's like being orange. There's nothing wrong with being orange, but some people make fun of orange people. They might even hate orange people, and if you're orange, who do you want to hang out with?"
That's easy. Orange people. And that's no joke.
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