On Bob Fossil’s Belly

I have a giant crush on Bob Fossil. I LOVE him. If I could still bear children, I would want to make a big chubby Bob Fossil baby. Bob Fossil makes me want to get up and do my dirtiest silliest dance.

Who is this Svengali who makes a middle aged professor want to take all her clothes off, find a pole, and do a pole dance – assuming she doesn’t throw her back out in the attempt? Bob Fossil is a pretend fictional character from the BBC TV series The Mighty Boosh. He is an out of control, power-mad, probably homosexual nincompoop who runs a zoo and who doesn’t know the names for any of the animals.

He loves to dance, and make people watch him. He dances sexy, dirty, and ridiculously -- like he was a bad stripper, an aging disco queen, or a cage dancer from the 60’s.

Most importantly Bob Fossil has a huge, white, round belly that continually protrudes in obscene little sections through the gaps of a tiny, barely buttoned, pale blue safari shirt. The shirt has epaulettes. It wants to be a uniform, but that belly shines forth like a beacon between and below the shirt, reminding us that nothing having to do with the body can ever be “official.” The body is its own wild animal, and it cannot – literally—be contained.

Personally, I have always had a problem with my belly. When I became a fat child, the belly was the fattest part of me.

Now that I am a menopausal 56 year old, my belly has returned with a vengeance; the once and future fattest part of me once again reigns supreme. Lords it over blue jeans. Humps and jumps out of dresses, curls its lip and swells disdainfully over underwear.

Until Bob Fossil came into my life I could not make peace with the belly. Granted, I had refused surgery and the insane dieting of yesteryear, but I had retreated – as many women do -- away from myself as body, away from myself as sexual being into a low-level sense of what Muriel Rukeyser once called despisal. Despisal is insidious. You don’t entirely hate the way you look. You just feel a mild sense of nausea when you think about yourself. You avoid looking at your body whenever possible, and you regard all compliments as lies – albeit kind ones. It’s not a big deal; it’s just a little despair, a tiny daily dose of deep desperation. All because of the belly.

And then along comes Bob Fossil and his too tiny shirt and his terrible dancing. When Bob Fossil struts on camera with that bulbous belly birthday cake of flesh, I reach for something spacious in myself and find it. I want an invite to the tummy party he’s incarnating. Watching Bob Fossil’s belly makes me want to wear hip huggers, a very tight shirt, and a pushup bra, and a lot of eye makeup and super high heels. Because why the hell not?

Writers like Rabelais celebrate what has been called the “carnivalesque” body. Bob Fossil shows us what fun that carnivalesque body is to own because of the fun you can have with it. The way you can feed it, fuck with it, and flaunt it.

Excuse me. I feel a pole dance coming on.