WAYLAND, Mass. The first signs of spring are beginning to appear in the Northeast, and with them plans for the numerous walk-a-thons, 6 kilometer races and other charitable fund-raising events that crowd the region’s roads with the coming of warm weather.
“We have old narrow highways, so sometimes tempers flare when a walker walks somebody off the road,” says State Trooper Jim Hampey as he monitors two different streams of volunteers converging at the intersection of routes 20 and 27. “It can get ugly in a hurry, assuming you didn’t start out ugly in the first place.”
“Whatta you lookin’ at?”
For one such event, the Walk for the Cure for Man Boobs, the ten-mile route is a mine field for those who suffer from the affliction, as participants in the “Break the Chain Walk to End Smoking” taunt their flabbier fellow walkers. “Hey fat boy,” says Claude Thurman, a rail-thin cigarette addict who gets his oral gratification from Marlboro Lights in the hard pack. “Those things are worthless as tits on a boar!”
“You guys are like totally gross!”
“May be, pal,” says Furman Boul, a claims adjuster who has spent the better part of the winter on his sofa watching televised sports, “but I’ll be reclinin’ in my La-Z-Boy where your bony ass is six feet under.”
“Why don’t you bend over and pick up your damn bowling ball!”
It’s not just other men who are dismissive of victims of man boobs. Women line the streets when the long file of sufferers moves through Sudbury, and they make it clear that they think the supposed ailment of the marchers is all their fault. “Why don’t you lift something heavier than a 12-ounce can of beer every once in a while,” yells Linda Fairchild, who has just come from a private session with a personal trainer that shows in her well-toned upper arms and torso. “You eat a bag of marshmallows,” she yells at Wade Newsome, “you end up looking like one.”
“Foot long subs . . . foot long subs!”
Sympathy runs low for the victims of man boobs, because they are viewed as partly responsible for their condition, or at the very least capable of correcting it. “I don’t know why those guys get their own march,” says Norton Dennison, executive director of VOSII, an acronym that stands for “Victims of Self-Inflicted Injuries”. “I’ve got guys who fell out of tree stands hunting, or ran over their own foot with a lawn mower, who are in much worse shape.”
Tags: charity walks, comedy, humor, man boobs, spoof
