The one in which I give a specific supermodel entirely more thought than I ever deemed reasonable

On the trip back to Minnesota after Thanksgiving, my sister was reading some gossip magazine beside me while I drove, and at one point, she announced that Tyra Banks weighs 150 pounds. Now, I'm not a 22-year-old male with crazy delusions of scale, thinking any woman over 115 pounds is a fatty. I know that for a tall woman, 150 pounds is not fat. I'm a tall woman myself (an inch taller than Tyra, actually, according to her profile on IMDB), and I know that if I weighed 115 pounds, I would look not unlike a bobble-headed Bratz doll (or, you know, more frightening than an over-the-hill Olsen twin). But 150 pounds? Tyra Banks, supermodel? I just don't see it. Here's why. I don't weigh 150 pounds. And yes, yes, muscle weighs more than fat, and it's highly likely that Ms. Banks's fat to muscle ratio is quite different from mine, but still. I really have to question any source that says Tyra Banks weighs more than I do.

I considered doing a bit further research on the matter, but my attention span is short and my commitment to the truth is, apparently, lacking, and by the time I got home, I nearly forgot about the whole thing. Forgot about it, that is, until this evening, when I flipped through my 12 television channels (life without cable: yes, it is still possible!) and landed on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.

What an interesting event the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is. I can't say I've ever caught it before. I'm not sure if the enormous alphabet blocks and stuffed bear flanking the runway were supposed to somehow complement the million-dollar diamond-studded bras and g-strings or if they were an attempt to make an otherwise purely sexy show more family friendly in some absurd way. I'm also not sure what Ricky Martin was doing on the stage... Is he still around? Really? And what happened to his hips? Didn't they used to wiggle like a vibrating Magic Fingers bed? Did someone forget to put the quarter in him tonight? Because he wasn't shaking it like he used to and frankly, Ricky Martin without the ass and the hips is just bad hair and mediocre (at best) singing, so I really don't understand the point.

You know another thing of which I don't understand the point? Shaggy fur boots. Seriously, can we be done with these already? No one needs to be a Yeti from the knee down, particularly when the rest of the body is wearing nothing but underwear and angel wings. (OK, so that last part refers only to the Victoria's Secret runway models--I hope--but it's good advice for the rest of the nation as well.) You know, what really scares me about these ridiculous boots is that trends tend to trickle in slowly in the Midwest and then stick around long after they've been abandoned by the coasts. Knowing that, I have a feeling I've seen only the beginning of the Sasquatch boots around these parts (which, really, I have to say, is more than enough), and they'll truly take over full force long about January 2008. (Something to look forward to. Joy.)

But I digress. Back to Tyra. As you may have heard (unless you've been living in a cave or, I don't know, actually working while at work instead of trolling various Internet sites), Tyra Banks plans to retire from supermodeling, and tonight's Victoria's Secret show was to be her last runway stroll. Given that fact, the show paid particular attention to Tyra, and I suddenly remembered my question of her weight and paid particular attention to her myself. This time, however, I had a computer nearby, and since the Internet knows everything, I thought I'd see what it has to say on the matter. The answer was a lot, but not much that was very helpful. Various sources put her anywhere between 108 (sorry, I don't think so) and 146 pounds. Suddenly I truly pity the teachers who have to grade children's papers in the age of Internet-as-source-material.

What I did find, from a presumably usually semi-reliable source, were the measurements that Tyra herself supposedly revealed on her talk show earlier this year. I'm not going to bother listing them; you can look them up yourself if you're so inclined. Suffice it to say that Tyra apparently lives in some Bizarro World where up is down and celery tastes like fried chicken and cameras magically shrink normal sized women, rather than revealing the extra ten pounds we've always been told that they add.

Because I'm lame and apparently have nothing better to do with my time (and because I have a cute new tape measure that I recently purchased at Jo-Ann Fabric & Crafts), I decided to do a little comparison study. If I am to believe Ms. Tyra's alleged word (and my presumably accurate discount tape measure), my chest is actually one inch larger than hers, which is, of course, just plain crazy talk. I mean, have you seen that woman's knockers? Of course you have. My waist is two inches larger, which is significantly easier to believe. And my hips? Well, I've never really figured out just where you're supposed to measure your "hips," which is just one of several very good reasons I'm not a seamstress. Regardless of the point at which I choose to measure, I can't get my hips to be as wide around as Tyra's allegedly are. All of this means one of two things: 1) Tyra is a liar, or 2) I have no idea how to use a tape measure. Either way, there's no way that woman weighs more than I do, but I suppose it's fun to think there's a possibility that she does.