Redefining "Not Giving Even a Tiny Rat's Ass", Dept.

Star Jones: I had gastric-bypass surgery - omg:

"Star Jones: I had gastric-bypass surgery

Star Jones Reynolds says in a new interview that her dramatic weight-loss was due to gastric-bypass surgery, and that she dodged questions about it for years because she was 'scared of what people might think of me.'

"I used to look in the mirror and take pride in my figure, but that was when I was legitimately a full-figured woman," she says. "I'd gradually gone from full-figured to morbidly obese."

Reynolds opted for surgery after a friend expressed concern about her weight. It was a success, she says, though she found she was "still consumed with the same anger, shame and insecurity as before."

Her husband, banker Al Reynolds, encouraged her to begin psychological therapy in the summer of 2005. She learned, among other things, that she "couldn't control what others thought," she says. She began to heal by talking openly about her weight loss to strangers."


Wow.

It's a shame that the same skilled team of doctors that performed the gastric-bypass surgery couldn't have taken advantage of Ms. Jones Reynolds' sedation to perform a full rectal craneotomy. In layman's terms, "pulled her head out of her ass." Yet, how brave of her to bare her soul to Glamour magazine just about the time her celebrity has cooled like a big shit pie on the windowsill.

Where to start?

How about the pride that Ms. Jones Reynolds used to take in her "legitimate full figure"? Understandable, of course. It takes character and dedication to work one's way painstakingly through that many buckets of the Colonel's extra-crispy finest. She earned those rolls and bulges, mister! And the line between "legitimately full-figured" and "sideshow material" is a thin and wavery one. Particularly when viewed through sunglass lenses smudged with Popeye's biscuit fat.

Surprisingly, the gastric bypass did not bring her the sort of immediate relief we as a people have come to associate with risky, last-ditch cosmetic surgeries. However, the fact that she still felt "consumed with the same anger, shame and insecurity as before" might be due to the tension she felt between the fact that she has no appreciable talent, charisma, or culture and the fact that she was earning boo-koo bucks in a position that ostensibly demanded talent, charisma, and culture.

A sobering thought indeed.

Gratefully, she has the love and support of a concerned spouse who, despite a Berlin Stonewall of rumors, is in no way gay. He said to her what so many of us Star-gazers have thought, "Girlfriend, you have got to go get yourself a shrink or sumthin', mm-hmm." And it is a tribute to the power of the psychiatric--dare I call it "art"? I dare--art that she learned that no matter how hard she furrows her tubby brow, she cannot control others' thoughts. How many times have we seen her on that brilliant forum for distaff discourse, The View, fingers to temples, concentrating so hard the sweat bullets were practically popping off her face, trying to get her co-hosts, through sheer mental manipulation, to admit she was the undisputed Queen of the Hive? But thank the Lord she learned a valuable, no, make that an invaluable, lesson: sweet, righteous healing can only come through burdening strangers with the minutiae of your crap life.

And so we leave Star Jones Reynolds, celebrity, seeker, child of God, to continue her therapeutic journey by inflicting the fascinating details of each twirl and swirl through life's eddies on us, her adoring public.

Heal on, Star. Heal on.