A long time ago I stood in a book store, book in hand, waiting to be served whilst four cashiers chatted animatedly about the workshop they had just attended.
The workshop dealt with marketing strategies for small book shops.
I stood there wanting to buy a fifty dollar book whilst they ignored me.
Finally I started to laugh and they looked at me in puzzlement.
I held up the book and said: "I'd like to buy this book, please!"
One of them got the irony and laughed with me.
Yesterday I sat with a group of women none of whom were larger than a size eight and for twenty minutes they discussed dieting and how weight was simple to control.
I have been on every diet imaginable to mankind.
I am very healthy. I am not proud of my weight...but it does not define me. I know for a fact that one of the women in the room is frantically trying to eat...she has difficulties just maintaining her weight since dealing with oral cancer...thanks to an earnest dietitian who said weight was bad, she was 100 pounds before her surgery. I know that another woman has a daughter who fights anorexia. And I know that two other women in the room are wraith-like...
     But what I knew most was that I would have to sit quietly and not say a word. I obviously was not an authority on weight control....
     That having been said, if I had decided to say anything, I would have cautioned all of them that appearance does not define a being...that we all have to work on the inner being...that's what I'm working on! Inner beauty...alas that is in direct conflict with my Irish nature...it is a battle with the yes-but's...
      And of course the great irony is that I have lost close to 20 pounds in this last year and no one notices...but I know...and my doctor knows...and that's what counts...
       I think Chihuly understood inner beauty.