“Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Fat”

Like the late art critic Clement Greenberg, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are highbrows. As you may very well imagine, this entails watching numerous episodes of the VH-1 masterpiece “Celebrity Fit Club,” a program so stupid that you might even cringe when you find out that Gary Busey was involved with it.

After all, thanks to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” article, a budding intellectual can eschew Proust and Stravinsky, and take in all manner of crap. Thanks, Susan: The life of the mind has never been so easy.

We mention all this, dear reader, not to make you envious of our elitist tastes. Indeed, “Celebrity Fit Club” is the Finnegans Wake of the boob tube, but we don’t want to lord that over you.

Rather, we offer this little tidbit because we have recently discovered that one Kelly LeBrock is one of the overweight participants on the program. For those of you blissfully unaware of Ms. LeBrock, allow us to jog your memory.

Ms. LeBrock is a vaguely talentless actress-cum-model who was featured decades ago in a bevy of Pantene shampoo commercials. The then-fetching Ms. LeBrock, who boasted a darn fine hairdo, archly uttered the irksome line “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” to the camera, whilst her locks swayed in the studio-created breeze. This, apparently, sent the ladies to the shampoo aisle in droves.

To which we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” replied: Don’t worry, Ms. LeBrock, that was never the reason. We’ve hated you, of course, but your “beauty” never even factored into the equation.

In fact, these shampoo spots were so successful that they even landed Ms. LeBrock a starring role in the resplendent 1980s epic Weird Science. Said pic, also starring Anthony Michael Hall, firmly enshrined Ms. LeBrock as an honest-to-goodness vixen, a pre-pubescent boy’s vision of pulchritude.

Imagine our collective shock, then, upon witnessing a dumpy Ms. LeBrock slumming it up on “Celebrity Fit Club.” First, the show is so horrid that participating in it is as close as you’ll get to a sure-fire sign your career is over. Just ask Victoria Jackson, whose irritatingly squeaky voice hasn’t even been vaguely unfunny on television for a while.

Worse yet, the previously beauteous Ms. LeBrock is advertising her gut for all to see. (Well, for all who watch VH-1 to see, which we hope is actually a small number of viewers.)

So the gorgeous Ms. LeBrock has become the television equivalent of the bearded woman. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! We wonder if the fellow who played Wyatt is similarly disappointed.