If you grew up in Southern California, you probably got sick of TV commercials from a gent named Earl Scheib who boasted he'd paint any car any color for only $29.95. That was cheaper than any mechanic or service department but we had my mother's car painted by them once and…well, you know the old saying, "You get what you pay for?"

As I recall, there was also a lot of upselling going on — offers to do body work and other services they'd try to convince you your car desperately needed…suggestions you might be happier with the $39.95 paint job or the $49.95 paint job…various hidden charges, etc. But Mr. Scheib's $29.95 offer got you and your car onto his lot. That was the point. Here's a flashback to the commercial which back then, interrupted every old movie I tried to watch on television at least once, sometimes more than once in a single airing…

As you may know, I get an awful lot of unsolicited phone calls from solicitors who want to sell me stuff I would never in a trillion years buy or just have me give them money. They come in waves and the latest wave — because my info has gotten onto another list somewhere it shouldn't be on — is for Student Loan Settlers. These are companies that propose to somehow refinance my Student Loan so that instead of owing tens of thousands of dollars, I can make a few payments of seventy bucks and be done with it all.

At least, that's my limited understanding…limited because the callers never get through the entire sales pitch. I inform them that (a) I was last a student around 1974 and (b) I never had a Student Loan. It says something that they're placing these calls to a 73-year-old man. Are there still people who are 73 who are struggling to pay off their Student Loans? Possibly.

I've also had a recent flurry of calls asking to speak to my mother who, they are unaware, died in 2012. These calls are either about selling of fixing the home she owned but which I sold…or they're asking for donations because she sent their charity money fifteen years ago. The ones calling about the house go instantly away when I tell them the house is no longer owned by her or her heir (me). Most of the charities hang up when I tell them she's deceased and some apologize greatly for calling…

…but some of them suggest I have a duty to donate in her memory to a cause she supported a decade and a half ago. If my mother was still alive, she'd be 103 years old. I'm going to start telling the charities that call how she can't afford to donate to them because she's still paying off her Student Loan.

Who invented the Top Ten lists on David Letterman's talk shows? Well, if we're to believe this oral history, just about everyone on the premises at the time.

Donald Trump seems to have this idea that if he merely claims he's settled a war, he has, end of story. He and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met and proclaimed "one of the great days ever in civilization…a historic day of peace…let's call it eternal peace" and you could kind of hear Trump thinking, "My Nobel Peace Prize should be arriving any minute now." As Fred Kaplan points out, there is one thing wrong with this new peace plan: Only one side has agreed to it and the other will regard it as Near-Total Surrender.

I like to feature great magicians on this site and a lot of folks in that profession would tell you of their admiration for Lennart Green. Mr. Green, who doesn't seem to be performing much these days, had a unique style, acting very clumsy and disorganized while being one of the most skillful card handlers of all time. He invented an awful lot of moves which other sleight-of-hand specialists looked at and said, "I have got to learn how to do that" and did. Here from a 1997 magic special is a short segment of Lennert Green which other magicians studied over and over and over…

This is the third in a series of I-still-have-no-idea-how-many parts about a gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. To read the first part, click here and to read the second part, click here.

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Monday morning before I could call Dr. Preston's office for what I hoped would be a same-day appointment, he called me. He said, "Dr. Bush tells me you're ready to discuss Gastric Bypass Surgery. I'm booked solid with patients all day. The only time I'm not is an hour for lunch…so let's have lunch." We had lunch and I asked him about the "odds" I'd been hearing about G.B.S. leading to complications and even death.

He said, "Forget about those numbers. First off, with a lot of the people who are having the surgery, it's like a last, desperate roll of the dice. They're 68, they're three hundred pounds or more, they have bad hearts and a dozen other things wrong with them."

And he had a story. That was one of the great things about Dr. Preston. Hw always had a story. This one about a patient whose case he was familiar with, a man who had died following the surgery. "He had like a 5% chance of survival if he didn't have the surgery. You can't compare the stats on people like that to you. You're ten years younger than he was, your heart is in great shape and so is your liver and just about everything else. You're in excellent health except for the fact that you need to lose a hundred or more pounds."

He went on: "This surgery is relatively new and there might be some surgeons doing it who maybe don't have enough experience. I'm not going to let you go to one of them. There are several in town who are terrific at it." He mentioned a few names — one was the doctor who did Alice Maltin's surgery — and he singled out one in particular. Again, I am changing names here. The surgeon he thought was the absolute best is a man I'm calling Dr. Perfect. That's what his track record to date was: Perfect.

But Dr. Perfect was not totally perfect for my needs. His services were in such demand that he had a wait list of at least two years. "I don't want to wait two years," I told Dr. Preston, to which he replied, "You won't. Dr. Perfect owes me a couple of favors and I bet I can get you moved way up on his list. Besides, this is not something you just go in and do next week. There's a whole process you have to go through and qualify before he'll operate on you and it could take months." I made the decision to start the process and it did indeed take months — and more than a few of them.

I had to have all sorts of check-ups and heart scans and meetings and my bravado occasionally faltered. I told a few people I was "contemplating" the surgery before I learned that telling just about anyone was a mistake. It yielded lot of under-informed, rumor-based "facts" and theories I really didn't need in my brain, co-mingling with what I was hearing from Dr. Preston and others who really knew what the were talking about.

Most of the folks I told knew (or more often, knew of) someone who'd had some form of Gastric Bypass and regretted it dearly. One or two friends felt an obligation to save my life by talking me out of such a reckless, self-destructive, sure-to-end-in-disaster decision. In some cases, the conversation went like this…

ME: Where did you hear about this person who had Gastric Bypass Surgery and died three days later?

OTHER PERSON: Oh, somewhere. I think it was on the Internet somewhere.

As we all know, you can believe each and every word someone remembers reading somewhere on the Internet.

One person who was very worried about what I was considering was my dear lady friend/companion Carolyn — but then she'd always had a deep distrust of hospitals and conventional medicine. Partly because of her, partly because of other friends and partly because I still had some natural apprehensions, I found my commitment to the procedure softening a bit.  Over the months of qualifying for it, I kinda inched from "I'm going to have the surgery!" to "I'm going to do everything I can to qualify for the surgery!  If and when the day finally comes when I get a date for Dr. Perfect to perform it, I'll decide whether of not to go through with it!"

One of Dr. Perfect's associates later told me that of all the people who came to that moment — who were offered firm dates for the operation — about 10% (in his words, not mine) "chickened out." As you shall see in a later chapter of this series, others chickening out turned out to be a benefit to me.

As I recall, the first thing I had to do was to attend a kind of "orientation" meeting. Once a week, the hospital would welcome folks who were considering the procedure or at least curious about it. Such folks would fill a classroom-like hall and view a video about Gastric Bypass Surgery. Then a doctor who worked on such cases, though not at Dr. Perfect's level, would deliver a Powerpoint lecture about the procedure. He'd be followed by someone who'd undergone it and then the doctor and the patient would answer any and all questions.

The day I attended, I found myself in a room full of very, very large human beings, many of them way larger than I would ever be. The start of the presentation was delayed because when I got there a tad late, there was only one seat open and I had a lot of trouble just getting to it. The aisles were clogged with fat people. Some of them moved aside as much as they could, some of them couldn't move enough and I just about climbed over one very large lady like I was conquering Kilimanjaro. She actually seemed to enjoy it.

At the moment when it looked like I'd never make it to that open chair, the doctor who was waiting to begin the festivities asked, "Can't you get to your seat?" and I replied, "If I could get to my seat, I wouldn't be here!"

That evoked a very big laugh from the very big people in the not-big-enough room with the not-big-enough chairs and aisles. As I would learn, there was a very healthy amount of camaraderie to be found among overweight individuals. We all had a lot of the same problems.

The presentation though didn't really tell me anything Dr. Preston hadn't told me. The best thing about it was that huge laugh I got and the fact that the seminar was one of the few things in the qualifying process that didn't cost me anything. Some of the other stops on my journey were mostly-covered by my insurance and only cost me a modest co-pay but some were not covered and not cheap. The actual procedure would cost me almost nothing but. uh, there was one kinda important thing missing: It did not include the services of Dr. Perfect.

As Dr. Preston explained to me, the hospital had very good surgeons who could do it without me paying an extra cent but Dr. Perfect was, as he kept saying, the best in the business.  As in most businesses, the best costs extra.   In this case, I think it was $10,000 which, Dr. Preston assured me, was well worth the money.

Lest you think for a nano-second that he was suckering me into some bait-and-switch scam or maybe getting a cut of Dr. Perfect's action, no, no, no.  That was absolutely not the case and it turned out to be the smartest ten grand I ever spent.  Among the least beneficial (but still required) amounts I spent was that for the one and only time in my life as of this moment, I had to pay for and have a session with a psychiatrist. The entire session went roughly like this…

HIM: How do you expect your life to change if you have this operation and it results in you losing a hundred or more pounds?"

ME: I expect I'll be smaller and healthier and I'll fit into airline seats and feel like I fit into the world better.

HIM: Okay, we don't need to go through the other stuff…

I could have left then but since I was paying for a 45-minute session, I insisted on chatting for at least a little while longer, mainly about why the hell I had to see a psychiatrist at all. He didn't really give me a good answer but later, Dr. Preston did: "There are many people who have the surgery, lose a lot of weight and then experience severe emotional problems because it doesn't change every single thing in their lives that they were hoping it would change."

As always, he had a real-life example — a true tale about a patient one of his colleagues had counseled: "This guy couldn't hold a job, he couldn't attract a mate and he didn't have any friends, not because he was grossly overweight but because he was just an obnoxious, angry person. He had the procedure, he lost the weight…he probably saved his life. But then he was furious that he didn't suddenly get a great job, a great girl friend, a circle of friends and so on.  That was because he was still obnoxious and angry. In fact, the failure of the surgery to make all his dreams come true made him even more obnoxious and angrier."

Doc Preston went on: "Seeing a shrink really shouldn't be necessary in your case but one of the reasons Dr. Perfect has had such good results is because he insists on knowing every single thing about his patients, inside and out. He requires more tests and x-rays and ultrasounds and scans than anyone else." Indeed, over the next few months, I found myself driving all over the city for test after test after test…and this was just to get on Dr. Perfect's long, long waitlist which I was not yet on.

If and when I did get on it, two things would have to happen. One was that Dr. Preston would have to use his clout to get me leapfrogged over many others and moved up on the list. He was confident he could. I wasn't. And the other thing was that if I did, I would probably have to have most of the same tests performed again before Surgery Day since they'd be months old by then.  At the end of 2005, I'd been on that journey for over a year and my determination to go under the knife — even a knife wielded by Dr. Perfect — was waning.

Then in February of '06, three things happened in rapid succession that got me thinking that it could happen, it should happen and it would happen.  I'll tell you about them in the next chapter.  We still have quite a ways to go. This will not be over in another chapter or two or three, I'm afraid…

I have this wonderful longtime friend named Tracy. She used to be Tracy Abbott and now she's Tracy Cook. By any name, she's a sweet, smart lady I love dearly for everything she does, which includes political activism.

She was once my secretary — and if in the mid-to-late eighties, you had a letter published in Groo or any other comic wherein I ran a letters page, there's a good chance Tracy retyped your letter for publication. She went from that to writing for television including Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In the latter gig, she became the first female writer in the history of The Tonight Show. Steve Allen never hired a woman. Jack Paar never hired a woman. Johnny Carson never hired a woman.

For a while, she turned her activism on the various schools her son was attending, even to the point of getting me to come in and talk to students about cartooning and teaching them to draw. Lately, she's directed her efforts to progressive causes including, very recently, the Jimmy Kimmel situation.

Tracy has a Substack account and she's posted two essays about the Kimmel matter. You can read the first one here and the second one here. Even if you're not interested in the politics and Freedom of Speech, you may find them of interest.

Really, really sad to hear about the passing of a real good friend, Rick Hoppe. People knew him best as an animation designer and animator, especially for Disney where he worked on Mickey's Christmas Carol, Black Cauldron, Aladdin, Little Mermaid and so many more, occasionally also contributing to other studios' projects. I knew him before all that. In the seventies, he was dabbling in comic books, doing a little (just a little) work for Gold Key Comics and for the Tarzan and Korak comics I edited for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate.

We lost touch for a while, reconnected, lost touch again, etc. I always thought if he'd followed his muse to draw comic books, he would have been one of the greats but he was slow and he fit in better at Disney where they paid him by the hour, not by the drawing, and didn't mind if he took a week to produce one. Because it was always worth the wait. Real nice, talented guy. He was 75.

Here's a little peek at what the new Stan Lee Hologram looks and sounds like. Would Stan have approved? Yeah, probably, if the money was right…

I received this message this morning and I'm going to omit the sender's name so as to not embarrass him. Just in case he wasn't deliberately trolling me…

The story I always heard about Run, Buddy Run! was that NBC wanted to cancel I Spy because it was costing so much in location shooting money. So they offered to greenlight Run, Buddy Run! for Sheldon Leonard's production company if he would let I Spy go off the air.

I think it was a bad bargain, all in all. Watching this episode again was painful.

There are a few problems with that story you always heard, starting with the fact that I Spy was on NBC and Run, Buddy, Run! was on CBS. Also, I Spy was a pretty popular show for its first few years and networks tend not to want to cancel popular shows…and when they do want to drop a program, they don't have to bribe the producer.

Also, I Spy was on NBC from September of 1965 until April of 1968, whereas Run, Buddy, Run! went on in September of '66 so even if it had been for the same network, it would not have displaced I Spy.

Also, Sheldon Leonard had nothing to do with Run, Buddy, Run!. The Exec Producer of that show was Leonard Stern, who was not the same person. Mr. Stern was a pretty successful creator and/or seller of TV programs including — in that era — Get Smart, The Hero, He & She, The Good Guys, The Governor & J.J., McMillan and Wife and I'm Dickens, He's Fenster.

But aside from all that, it's probably true.

Our pal Brian Hull, who has wowed audiences on some of my Cartoon Voices panels at comic conventions, demonstrates what he does so well…

Paul Krugman wonders if the Jimmy Kimmel "loss" for Trump is a turning point with more and more corporations being unwilling to knuckle under to his whims and will.

Krugman also makes mention of something I've seen mentioned elsewhere. Most polls now 54% of the population of this country disapproving of Trump's leadership versus 42% approving. Those are pretty bad numbers but they may be worse for D.J.T. than they appear because increasingly, the ones who hate Trump hate him a lot more than the ones who love him love him.

This is the second in a series of I-have-no-idea-how-many parts about a gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. To read the first part, click here.

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For several months in 2004, my splendid doctor-friend Dr. Preston and I talked about employing Gastric Bypass Surgery to lower my weight to some level below Morbidly Obese. Dr. Preston thought it could easily get me down to merely Obese…and then maybe we could lower it a few more notches via more conventional and time-tested means. We might even get it down to the point where, when Cirque du Soleil needed a new tent, they wouldn't phone and ask if I had an old pair of pants I was ready to give away.

Dr. Preston never pressed. He knew the ultimate decision had to be mine and I wasn't there yet. One thing that made me hesitant was that the news was then filled with stories about a weight-loss method known as Phen-phen. It had been a fad for a while and a lot of people, including people I knew, seemed to have lost a lot of weight on it. But there were problems and Wikipedia can explain them better than I can. Here's a cut-'n'-paste of what they have to say…

"Phen-phen" refers to Fen-Phen, a former anti-obesity drug combination of fenfluramine and phentermine. The drug was withdrawn in 1997 due to serious health risks, including heart valve disease and pulmonary hypertension, leading to significant legal damages. Phentermine, however, is still available as a separate medication for weight loss, while fenfluramine was removed from the market.

One of the people I knew who'd tried Phen-phen was the wonderful comic actor and human being, Chuck McCann. Chuck had been watching TV on April 1, 1996, the opening day of the 1996 Major League Baseball season. As the game was just getting started, home plate umpire John McSherry staggered away from his position and collapsed on the ground, the victim of a fatal heart attack. His weight, reported at 382 pounds, obviously had a lot to do with it and I'm sure Chuck wasn't the only person in America who thought, "God, I need to slim down before that happens to me."

Chuck went on Phen-phen, dropped a serious amount of weight and then — fortunately — got off the drug before any of the bad stuff could happen. If he hadn't, he might not have had a 70th birthday party for me to attend in September of 2004. It was at the lovely home he shared with his even-lovelier wife Betty and it was so full of familiar faces that it brought to mind the joke, "My God…I'm the only one here I've never heard of!" Before I'd been there a half hour, I'd talked with Betty White, Fred Travalena, Tim Conway, Don Knotts, Harvey Korman and Jack Sheldon. Jack had his jazz quartet set up in the McCann living room and they played all evening, including several repeats of Jack's best-known performance, "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock.

It was a wonderful party but I was ill at ease there. I just felt big and always in the way. No matter were I sat or stood, I was in someone's way and afraid to turn around for fear of knocking someone or something over. The buffet was, for me, really awkward: Plenty of yummy food but you had to fill your plate, stick the silverware in your pocket or somewhere, then find someplace to sit and eat, balancing the plate on your knees. After rejecting several chairs that looked flimsy and expensive, I found one next to my friends, Leonard and Alice Maltin.

It was my sturdiest option but I still worried that it might not survive me sitting on it and I was also afraid that out of sheer clumsiness, I would spill food all over myself and/or the McCanns' magnificent living room. I was sitting there, hearing the chair legs creak below me, wishing I was smaller and more graceful when Alice started telling me about her recent weight loss. She'd had Gastric Bypass Surgery and it had made a world of difference to her health, her life, her attitude, everything.

Why was she telling me all this? Well, why do you think?

Before that evening, I'd been keeping the notion of Gastric Bypass Surgery at arm's length. Phen-Phen had been the thing to do for a while but then the medical world figured out it was more dangerous than they thought. Gastric Bypass Surgery was the new thing to do. What if I had it done and then, a few years down the line, the medical world figured out it was more dangerous than they thought?

Then again, it had sure worked for Alice.

All this time, we had a great view of the front door, which was wide open. Every so often, we'd see some recognizable person arrive. Just as Alice finished telling me about the glories of her Gastric Bypass Surgery, we all spotted two young ladies walk in…two stunningly gorgeous young ladies.

They were very blonde and very tan and though they almost certainly weren't related, they were trying to look like twins. They were dressed in matching skimpy halter tops that barely covered very large breasts which may or may not have been real. They were also wearing tight, cut-off jeans. Everyone around turned to stare at them and everyone thought the same thing: "Hef is here!" They were, it turned out, his honor guard of sorts, heralding his arrival.

Sure enough, they were followed in by Hugh M. Hefner himself who was in turn followed by his bodyguard. Hef was dressed in silk pajamas with a yachting/captain's cap and quickly began making the rounds, speaking briefly to everyone at the party. All eyes were on him and his ladies and you could hear people murmur, "I don't believe it! Hefner leaving his mansion? To visit someone else's house?" Clearly, this was not something the publisher of Playboy did often.

Clearly too, he was not going to be doing it for long. The main assignment of the bodyguard seemed not to be to protect his boss from harm but to protect him from getting drawn into long conversations, the better to get the hell out of there A.S.A.P. Someone told me later that the whole time Hef was in Chuck's house, a limo was waiting outside the front door with the motor running. The bodyguard also whispered to Hef to tell him the names of certain folks he did not recognize.

In a chair to my left was seated a man in a red pullover sweater like Mort Sahl always wore on stage…which was entirely appropriate since he was Mort Sahl. I heard Hefner say hello to him and say "I'm Hugh Hefner" — and then, loud enough for me (and probably Mr. Sahl) to hear, the bodyguard whispered "Mort Sahl" to Hef and Hef realized he was talking to one of his oldest friends. When he got to us, Hef didn't remember me — I wouldn't have expected him to — but he also didn't remember Leonard, who knew Hef a lot better than I did and who had worked for Playboy a lot.

All of this led up to a moment I will never forget, nor should I. Because in hindsight, it was a pretty important moment in my life…

Hefner was talking to Leonard, not entirely sure who he was. The two drop-dead-gorgeous blonde ladies were standing directly behind my chair but I couldn't even turn to look at them, paralyzed as I was by the fear that the chair I was in was about to implode with me in it. I felt like if I made a move, I would at the very least spill buffet food all over myself, the Maltins and maybe even Hugh Hefner or Mort Sahl. Everywhere around me was an elevated potential for embarrassing myself in front of a lot of friends and people I admired. I'd certainly ruin Chuck McCann's wonderful birthday party…

…all because I was clumsy and awkward and just too fucking big.

I am not one prone to panic attacks. This is the only one I can remember and I sure as hell can't forget it…or stop shaking a bit as I'm writing this. All I could do at that moment was to not move an inch and to stare straight forward. And when I stared straight forward, what I saw was a man I recognized as Chuck's doctor, Dr. Bush.

How is it I recognized Chuck's doctor? Because Chuck's doctor had occasionally consulted on my medical issues. He was one of five doctors who practiced in a medical office in Beverly Hills and one of the other four was my Dr. Preston.

I summarized for myself what was happening: Alice telling me about Gastric Bypass Surgery…me feeling awkward sitting on a chair that could shatter at any minute and dump me on my XXXL butt…food balanced precariously on my knees…breasts to the left of me and I was afraid to turn to look at them…breasts to the right of me and I was afraid to turn to look at them…one of my doctors four yards from me…

That's when I said — not aloud, just to myself — "Okay, okay…I get the message!" I remained motionless until Hefner, the bodyguard and the Playboy Twins had moved on so Hef could greet some other old, dear friend he didn't recognize. I then carefully handed my buffet plate to Alice Maltin, got up even more carefully from the creaky chair which had somehow survived having me on it, then I staggered over to Dr. Bush who saw me coming and said, "Mark! Great to see you!"

I said, "I want to see you…you and Dr. Preston, Monday morning if it's possible. I want to start the process to have Gastric Bypass Surgery."

Dr. Bush said, "Well, it's about time."

This story will continue in a day or three. We have a long way to go…

Before I get to Today's Video Link, a word about Yesterday's Video Link: A lot of you have written to ask about why I ran an old Buster Keaton short comedy and didn't point out that, decades before Blazing Saddles, there was a character in there named Hedley Lamarr. I noticed that when I watched it and I'm kinda wondering why I didn't point that out myself.

On to Today's Video Link…

Here's a sitcom from the sixties that I vaguely remember. It's the first episode of Run, Buddy, Run! starring Jack Sheldon as a hapless guy who happens to overhear some mobsters planning some murders and then has to flee for his life. This first episode aired on September 12, 1966, the last episode (of sixteen) aired on January 2, 1967 and the next week, its time slot was filled by Mr. Terrific, a super-hero sitcom that I also vaguely remember.

The first and only issue of the Run, Buddy, Run! comic book published by Gold Key Comics came out on March 23, 1967, by which time everyone in America — including, probably, Jack Sheldon — had forgotten all about Run, Buddy, Run!

Some talented and experienced people were behind Run, Buddy, Run! but I don't think you'll have to watch a lot of it to wonder why it didn't go. You may be wondering why it even got picked up as a series at all…

This is the first in a series of I-have-no-idea-how-many parts about a gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. I didn't write that much about it at the time and I'm not sure why because it is, I'd like to think, a pretty interesting story. I will now but I want to make one thing clear from the start: I am not recommending anyone rush out and have this operation…or any operation. At most, I might be recommending that if it seems like something that might be right for you, you seek out a qualified doctor and discuss this and other options. There are more options these days and the procedure, as performed now, is surely quite different from what I experienced in 2006. Just so we're clear on this.

Now then: I didn't have a weight problem until sometime in my late twenties, early thirties. It crept up on me so slowly that I didn't see it happening and I don't think those around me did either…not at first. Eventually, though my eating habits and physical activity did not change, I did. I got larger and larger.

I do not know just when I reached my peak weight but this photo, taken at a 2002 Christmas party, was probably around the heaviest I was. The other folks in the photo are Buddy Hackett, Leonard Maltin and Chuck McCann. I would have never thought I'd be the fattest person in a photo with Buddy Hackett…

Thanks to a number of factors, the gastric bypass being but one, I am now at my lowest weight this century. Here is a recent photo of me with my friend Gabriella. She took the picture and cropped off the top of my head where, if it were uncropped, you'd see that I have very little of the hair I had in the above photo. But there's a lot less of the rest of me, too…

But these stories are about the gastric bypass and the path that led me to mine began with a very fine doctor I had at the time — a man who was as much my friend as he was my physician. He prescribed a few weight-control drugs but they either had no effect on me or not-good ones. For reasons that wouldn't interest you, I'm going to change a few names in these tales and I'm calling this doctor of mine Dr. Preston.

Dr. Preston did not scold me or shame me or make me feel like I had done something horribly wrong to let my weight get so outta my control. He simply reminded me that it was a matter that had to be addressed — preferably sooner, not later — and that the later it got, the harder it would be to handle. At the time, I was experiencing no medical problems from being overweight. I was just Too Damned Big.

The problems I did have were the problems of living in a world that was not designed to accommodate someone of my girth. I felt large and clumsy and like I didn't fit onto the planet I was trying to inhabit. No matter where I was, if I was around other people, I felt like I was in the way. I had problems getting in and out of chairs and when seated in something that might break, I had a constant fear that it would break — because once or twice, it did. On airplanes, I had to ask for the Seat Belt Extender and even with it on and even when occasionally being flown First Class, I still felt uncomfy and wedged into my seat.

One day, Dr. Preston said something that really registered with me. He said, "Your problem, Mark, is that you're not paying a high enough price for being so overweight. You would do something about it now if you were experiencing the medical problems it will create for you in the future."

He let that sink in for a minute and then he added, "And in the future, it will be a lot harder to fix."

And as that was sinking in — deep — he began telling me about Gastric Bypass Surgery, which at the time was relatively new. A lot of folks didn't even know its name or what it was. They referred to it as "That thing Al Roker did to lose all that weight!" Mr. Roker, a fixture still of The Today Show, had indeed been transformed by it and appeared, before and after, on many a magazine cover. Those covers were excellent recruiting posters for the procedure.

But like I said, it was new. It was also scary. There were statistics that said that X out of Y people who underwent the procedure experienced serious problems from it, up to and including death. "X" and "Y" varied but none of the specific ratios I heard or read sounded like great odds. Doc Preston did not shove me towards this option…gently nudged, maybe, but I did not feel shoved. He said, speaking as much as my friend as my doctor, that if and when I was ready to seriously discuss it, he would clear the time for that discussion.

That time would come and it came as a result of a party I attended. At the party were two of the three other people (not counting the largest guy, me) in the top photo above — Leonard Maltin and Chuck McCann. I shall tell you about this party in the next installment of this, a series that will probably run longer than you want it to.