Blog: Firefly

Actresses on TV, in the movies, and on the stage are almost all extremely thin, compared to the normal population. But we are so used to these images that we come to perceive their shapes as normal, with sometimes damaging results. Once in a while, though, something jolts our expectations and we can't help but realize how skewed the world of entertainment can be.

Avenue Q is my favorite musical. I saw it twice early in its run, with the original cast, and have the soundtrack which I know by heart. Recently I took Stefanie to see it for her birthday, since she never had.

I had a great time all over again, but couldn't help noticing the changes from the original. A few made sense, like adding a brief reprise of "It Sucks To Be Me" sung by Princeton at the start of Act Two. A few didn't, like cutting a bridge section from "Schadenfreude". None of these made the musical any less enjoyable, though one was really jarring.

Christmas Eve and Brian are really thin.

In the original, Christmas Eve was a fairly heavy woman. She was fun and spunky but not glamorous. And this is the way the character ought to be. After all, this character isn't an intern at a publishing house who spends hours a day at the gym. She's not expected to be part of the Manhattan culture of fashion obsession. She's a recent immigrant living in Brooklyn with an unemployed fiancee, so she should look more like an average American.

Brian, too, is supposed to be kind of a schlub. He's a class clown who presumably got by in childhood by being funny, not by being trim and athletic. And the original actors playing these characters fit the profile - or at least formed my opinion of the characters. Now, they've been replaced by people of significantly smaller size, and it's strange.

There's a great science fiction Western TV show called Firefly that was canceled after one season. One of the characters, Kaylee Frye, is the ship's mechanic and a hopeless romantic who has a tough time getting men to notice her. Jewel Staite, the actress, is by no means unattractive or even very heavy (many fans spoke about having crushes on her, on online message boards), but nonetheless part of her character is about not having a model physique. In fact, she was asked to gain 20 pounds to play the role in the original show.

But after its cancellation, they produced a feature film, Serenity, and to the surprise of many, Jewel and the rest of the cast had lost a huge amount of weight. Suddenly the Kaylee of the original show wasn't there, replaced by someone with the same face but such a different body it was difficult to see the character the same way.

Did Avenue Q's success create pressure to have actors that look more like other shows'? Did the Hollywood producers and directors require the cast to look thinner? Or, was it just circumstance? Jewel Staite is normally thinner than Keylee, so maybe she simply didn't want to put the pounds back on for the movie. Maybe the best replacement actors for Ann Harada and Jordan Gelber happened to be a lot thinner. Either way, these examples bring the skewed expectations of thinness in entertainment to the forefront, where we might not normally perceive their existence.