This is from a piece Elna Baker did for the This American Life radio show/podcast that explains it.
A year out of college, I took stock of my life. It was not going as planned. I was unemployed, and I had never been in a relationship. I tried for the life I wanted, hard. I got a scholarship to NYU. I was a huge flirt with lots of guy friends. But it felt like there was an invisible force blocking me from achieving my dreams.
Sure, I'd think, is it because I'm fat? But then I'd think, don't be paranoid. I refused to believe that people were that shallow. It had to be more complicated. I tried to put my finger on it, but I just couldn't figure it out. Once I lost weight, I realized, it was all because I was fat.
It felt like that famous Eddie Murphy sketch on Saturday Night Live, where he goes undercover in whiteface and gets treated way better. He rides the city bus. And when the last black rider gets off, music starts. A cocktail waitress in a sequined dress hands out martinis. That's what I felt like-- like this whole other world for thin people had existed alongside mine, a world they've been keeping a secret from me.
When I was fat and I walked down the street, people would stare. I'd hear comments that I would ignore. Occasionally someone would shout something out at me. In this new world, when I walked down the street, attractive men and women would do something to me they'd never done before. They would look me up and down, and then they would nod their heads. Thin people nod at each other?
One day, I went to pay for my groceries at a deli and realized I was short, off by a full $10. I looked at my pile and began debating what would stay and what would go. The deli guy waved his hand. "Just take it," he said. Take it? I walked out cautiously, not sure what had just happened.
So I tried the same thing at a different deli, this time on purpose. I picked out more items than I had money for. Then I faked debating which ones to choose. "Just take it," the man behind the counter said. Soon it was a scam I ran all over the city. It wasn't about saving money. I wanted to know, is this is a thing? It's a thing.
Of course, I'd lost the weight to fix two specific problems. I wanted to get a job and find love. Old Elna looked for a job for a year and a half. New Elna was offered work a month after she hit her goal weight, an entry-level position on an actual TV show.
I was hired to be a page at the Letterman show. My job was to walk down the line of people waiting to go into the theater and divide them into three groups-- dots, generals, and CBS twos. The dots were the beautiful people. They got seated in the first three rows. Usually those were the only rows you saw on television.
Generals were average people. They sat in the order they arrived. CBS two was for fat people, elderly people with a visible illness, people who looked like they might be disruptive, and goths. I'd scribble CBS two on their ticket. And that was code for, seat them in the back three rows at the balcony-- the nosebleed seats. I'd seen Letterman a few years earlier. I was near the front of the line and somehow ended up in the nosebleeds. I remember being confused by it. The day I was trained, I put it together.