Emotional dilemma

 I’m not sure how I should feel about something that happened tonight.

We had tickets to see Jeff Dunham at the UBS Arena.  We’re big fans. We’ve seen almost all of his tv specials.  We’d previously seen him live at the Nassau Coliseum in 2013 and at Westbury Music Fair in 2014.  I even named my blue Prius “Peanut”. (IYKYK).

Overall it was a great evening. We had wonderful seats, floor seats, four rows back from the stage.

(No photos from the show itself, they asked us to please not take photos or videos during the performance,) I was able to get a burger on a gluten free bun - ridiculously expensive but delicious. Jeff was hysterically funny.  And at the end of the night Drew bought me a t shirt — I chose a blue one with Peanut on the front.

Now here’s the thing that happened that has left me in an emotional quandary.

Background:  As you know, thanks to Wegovy I have lost 120 pounds.  I’m still 40 pounds above my ideal weight, but the changes the weight loss has brought to my life … 

Sometimes I get a bit of body dysmorphia, where I forget that I’ve lost all that weight and still think of myself at my former size.  But tonight was not a dysmorphic night!  None of my clothes (jeans, shirt, boots, open-front cardigan) came from the plus size department, and I felt so good.

As I said, we had floor seats for the show. The UBS Arena is home to the NY Islanders,  permanent seating is arranged to view the ice rink.  But when there’s a concert, they install a temporary stage at one end of the rink and install temporary seats on what would otherwise be ice.  The temporary seats are essentially folding chairs that are attached to each other to form rows, and no chair can move independently of the others,  

This photo is from Madison Square Garden, but as you can see from my two photos, UBS uses the same type of seating.

Folding chair, no armrests, tiny gap between chairs, chairs cannot be moved.  Understand?

So I’m sitting there, waiting for the show to begin, when a very large man and his even larger wife take seats in the row in front of me.  And even though they sit as close together as they can, she’s so large that part of her leg is actually resting on the empty chair next to her.  And my only thought is “I’m glad I’m not sitting next to her.”

And then, a few moments later, a woman sits down next to me.  She is also a large woman.  And I feel her thigh pressing against mine.  That means her leg was over the gap between chairs, and possibly on my chair …Drew says I should have said something to her, but I decide to ignore it, she really can’t move over anyhow.   But then, at the end of the show, I want to join the standing ovation.  But I can’t stand up because a piece of my cardigan is in the tiny gap between chairs, pinned between her leg and my chair.  And she either didn’t see me, or chose to ignore me, as I frantically tried to pull my sweater out of the gap.  

And while I knew that I should have sympathy for her — I used to be her, after all — in that moment I wanted to scream abuse at her, call her fat and lazy and …

But I said nothing, and a moment later I was able to free my sweater without her help.

The show was over, the house lights came up, and I walked away.

And Drew and I walked over to the merchandise table, and he bought me a t shirt in a size medium.  Medium, can you believe that? They were all out of large and the extra large would have been huge …when we in in Baltimore a few years ago, at Edgar Allen Poe’s  house, I had to squeeze into a 2x because they didn’t have a 3x of the shirt I wanted, 

Tonight was a fun night. 

But the incident with the other woman has left me unsettled.

But let’s end the night on a funny note.  Here’s a clip from 2007, and why I named my car after a Dunham character.