Fat Bubble: Cass Elliott
Welcome to the inaugural Fat Bubble newsletter! I’m so happy you’re in this space with me, and thanks for allowing me to show up in your inbox, which I know can be full of messages scrabbling for your attention. I hope, instead, this email will be an opportunity for me to give something to you – some joy, some fun, some inspo, some hope and healing.
Each week I’ll be profiling one of my Fat Elders – one of the ones who walked the path before us, and lit the way. They may have done this intentionally, or they may just be special to us because it’s special to see someone who looks like you, living out loud. Sometimes I might share fat inspo instead – a good book, a favourite song or film etc. Truly, I just want us to be able to really immerse ourselves in positive representations of bigger bodies, because it can really help to shift the internalised anti-fat hate that we can take on from a world that is still super judgmental about bigger bodies. Maybe this will be some antidote – some softness, some delight, some power.Â
Here is the first Fat Elder that I want to acknowledge here in Fat Bubble – it's the wonderful Cass Elliott.
Cass Elliott isn’t one of my first fat inspos – she's not one of the ones that formed me as a teen and in my 20s. Hell, I’m 40 and I’m kind of immersing myself in her work for the first time at the moment. But it felt right that she was the first, as she was part of the conversation that inspired this email series.
As I mentioned in my last email, the idea for Fat Bubble was borne from a conversation with my supervisor, and a real inspiration to my work, Hilary Kinavey. And within that I mentioned how much I'd enjoyed the last email from the Center for Body Trust, which outlined a brief history of the fat acceptance movement.
In it, Sirius outlines how Cass’ death inspired a public mourning of her life, led by fat activists wearing black armbands. When the world was already mocking her death, and the fatphobic ‘choked on a ham sandwich’ rumour began to be churned from the mill, it was fellow fat people that grieved and acknowledged her contribution to culture, and who also recognised how chronic dieting and weight cycling would have contributed to the stress under which her young body was trying to cope. She died aged just 33.
I've heard of this public event before, but it hit me in a new way, as I really sit with the meaning of this powerful public solidarity with Cass Elliott from the fat community – an honouring and an acknowledgment of both this aspect of her identity, and the harm and humiliation she experienced because of it through her life. I'm so grateful to those activists too, for reclaiming her legacy with such respect, from the very beginning of losing her.
I've deep dived in the last few weeks, and in doing so I can see how I already knew every song. But, listening to them again, I'm struck by how special they were.
It hurts my heart to think of how she faced anti fat bias throughout her career, in the ways we know about, and in the countless ways that will have now been lost to time. John Phillips kept her out of The Mamas and The Papas for a long time, believing her to be too fat. How many times has talent been overlooked because of anti-fat hate? How much do the careers of fat people suffer due to anti-fat discrimination?
I've been the chubby teen and fat twenty-something, desperately casting my eye around mainstream culture, looking for someone that looks like me that isn’t a joke or a stereotype. So I have a special empathic well in my heart, filled deeply with feeling for teens across the decades, who did exactly the same thing.
What was it like to be a fat teen in the 60s and 70s? Maybe the same as the 90s, quite frankly – precious little representation of anyone that looks like us. Music that we love sung by people whose posters we hang on our walls, but who don’t look like us. I wonder what it was like to see Cass Elliott for the first time, and to hear the kinds of songs she sang. How was it to see a bigger bodied woman singing hit music, wearing a kaftan? Did fat teens get a thrill to see Cass in go go boots and a mini shift dress, on the cover of Bubblegum, Lemonade and Something for Mama - 'what, you mean they make these clothes in my size'? Maybe Cass herself was thrilled to find knee length boots made to fit over her calf (and that thrill still hits, did you catch almost identical boots being sneak peaked on Wray NYC this week?!).
Imagining that gives me a sense of solidarity that crosses decades, and a thread of belonging that... is hard to put into words, but that I can feel so affirmatively in my body.
How was it to hear her grant permission in ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music’, or to imagine that a fat woman could be a heartbreaker in ‘Didn’t Want To Have To Do It’ - in our culture, fat people are to be broken up with, not to do the breaking up. How might it have felt for that woman to invite us to a different future, with ‘Don’t Let The Good Life Pass You By’ or ‘It’s Getting Better’ or ‘New World Coming’?
The messages are universal but, in a world that doesn’t let fat teens dream fat futures, watching Fat Elders promise just that is especially moving and valuable.Â
They speak to the hippie dream that Cass represented but, let me tell you, its hope hits differently when a person with a marginalised experience is singing to someone who shares that identity.Â
I just know that Cass Elliott was the start of a Fat Bubble for a lot of fat folks.
Do what I’ve done, get yourself to Spotify or YouTube and bop along. Now I’ve really connected with Cass’ music, I can’t imagine being without it! Thank you, Cass Elliott, you are so special to me!
Fat Bubble is my weekly love letter to all things fat, and I really hope it gives you value and joy. If you would like to support this offering, please do forward it on to anyone you think who would love to receive it, and invite them to sign up to my mailing list.
Do you have anyone you would love to see me profile on Fat Bubble? Just hit reply and let me know – I'd love to hear more!
Speak next week,
Vicky