In my socks, I stand five feet ten inches. Well, really only five feet nine-and-three-quarters inches, but my driver’s license says five-ten, and I’ve learned not to argue with the New Jersey DMV, especially since they keep issuing me renewal licenses that say I still weigh 140. Suckers. Anyhow, I’m tall. I’m not very tall – if you’ve met me once and you can’t quite remember me, your friends won’t prompt you by saying, “You know, the tall one,” or anything – and off the top of my head I can name four or five women I know personally who stand taller than I do. I don’t require special clothes, and I never get “how’s the weather up there” or dumb questions about basketball. Once in a while, someone calls me “Stretch,” but that’s it. I’m not as tall as Minnie Driver. I’m not nearly as tall as Gabrielle Reece. I’m just tall.

Most of the time, I enjoy my tallness. I can reach things on the top shelf at the supermarket, not that I usually shop above eye-level myself, but if I need one of those dusty cans of sauerkraut, I can get to it. In crowds, which I don’t like much, I can see over the majority of heads, which helps me feel less squished, and I can balance on the subway by pressing my hand to the ceiling. I like knowing that the top of Sylvester Stallone’s head only comes up to the bridge of my nose. I like knowing that, if I have to walk by myself at night, most muggers would probably rather wait for a short girl to come along than take their chances with a tall scowly one like me. I like putting on a pair of boots with a four-inch platform and clomping about in Even Taller Mode.

Still, greater-than-average height has its drawbacks. The world is not designed to accommodate anyone taller than five-seven, much less women taller than five-seven, and frankly, I don’t know how truly tall people (like my father, six-four, or my cousin-in-law, six-six) cope. Let’s take stairs as an example. The average set of stairs does not possess adequate depth for my feet to fit on them while facing forward. I tend to wear big, toaster-size shoes, but in terms of length, I don’t have huge feet – size nine – and yet I have to descend most flights using a bowlegged Mr.-Bojangles-the-trained-penguin stride. I also have to watch out for the inevitable overhang from the flight just above, lest I smack my forehead on it. It’s worth mentioning again that I’m not even six feet tall, but by the age of fourteen, I’d perfected the going-down-the-stairs head tilt to avoid clocking myself in the head. Leg-room presents another problem, namely that I never have enough – not on the train, not in cabs, and certainly not during air travel. Never mind unbending my legs in an airplane; if I sit in coach class, I can barely wedge my femurs into the space between the front panel of my seat and the back panel of the seat in front of me, and that only if the seat in front of me does not recline – and it always does. The lack of space in economy class has only gotten worse in recent years, to the point where I have to arrange myself in the shape of a garlic knot from the waist down if I get the window seat, or suffer my toes getting repeatedly mangled by the drink cart if I get the aisle seat, and the stewardesses do that fakety-fake sing-song “please pull your legs in, ma’am,” and don’t get me started on the whole “ma’am” thing, like, when did that happen – I’d like to know exactly where can I find this mysterious “in,” whither you would like me to pull my legs. Because I cannot store them in the overhead compartment, there to shift happily during flight, and I cannot stow them safely beneath my seat, and I cannot return them to the upright position during takeoff and landing, and thank you so much for your kind offer of a bone saw to go with my itty bitty little flat diet Pepsi in an itty bitty little chewed-on-looking plastic cup poured over itty bitty little melty ice cubes that taste like lint, but I do not remember this particular commuter route getting taken over by Midget Air (slogan: “short flights for short folks”), so perhaps you, or your employer, or the Boeing Corporation could deduce that, because we live in a healthy, wealthy, milk-drinking, non-polio-coming-down-with, Flintstones-vitamin-taking, fluoridated society, we might have a couple of citizens taller than Michael J. Fox who would like to travel to and fro without having to check themselves as baggage or undergo an amputation in the jetway in order to fit in our seats, and by the way, I don’t think we should have to parade our tall selves through the first-class section and the business section and look at the rich, first-class, business-like people enjoying their hot towels and Merlot, and I really REALLY don’t think we should have to look at the rich people’s rugrats sitting in seats so gigantic that their itty bitty little runty legs stick straight out in front of them, seats bigger than a queen-size mattress, seats that probably vibrate and press their runty little pants, so if you wouldn’t mind just relocating the rich people to the BACK of the plane so that we cattle-car types don’t have to endure their pitying stares as we limp past them on our bloody stumps, mooing, I’d appreciate it, because if rich people would like to own itty bitty little yappy dogs, I can’t stop them, but if I see one more goddamn Pomeranian in a Gucci collar occupying an ENTIRE SEAT in first class and panting with that eager little “I am so happy! I am a little dog! I am a little dog in a gigantic seat! Happy dog! Gigantic seat!” face, I swear to god, our flight will make the five-o’clock news.

To tell the truth, if they let me smoke on the plane, the lack of anything resembling blood flow to my lower extremities wouldn’t bother me so much, but anyway, the transportation industry needs to come to terms with the fact that the average height has risen. I hope they do it soon, because I like driving and everything, but I can’t drive to, say, Paris.

Anyhow. So, traveling with long legs poses a few difficulties, but not as complicated as the ones associated with men. I caught a glimpse of what lay ahead in sixth grade, when I attended the dread Barclay Classes every other Wednesday night during the school year. For those of you not in the suburban-pubescent-horror-show know, Barclay Classes consisted of ballroom dancing instruction, along with tips on manners and comportment; the boys had to wear jackets and ties, and the girls “party dresses” and white gloves. For whatever reason, the pre-adolescent population in my home town skewed heavily female, so our class always had a line of girls waiting to cut in, and in fact had to hire boys from the older grades to round things out a bit. I endured Barclay Classes for two years. Total number of boys my height or taller: two. One of these boys, with whom I had to carpool, smelled like ammonia and had serious problems taming the box step, and the other one wore plaid pants and spoke with great enthusiasm (well, if by “enthusiasm” we actually mean “spittle”) about his coin collection – and I will bet you money, now that I’ve made fun of Plaid, that my mother reads this and phones me up to inform me that Plaid turned out really cute – but I had to dance with either Stinky or Plaid, because none of the others even reached my shoulder. But when the instructors randomized the partnering system, then it really got scary. I distinctly remember one time when I got paired with a super-short redhead for a Charleston and coming out of a turn to find that the freckly little pipsqueak had abandoned me in the middle of the floor, and I had to keep going with that stupid flapper move where you put your finger on your partner’s head and wave your other hand while you walk in a circle, except I had to do it in mid-air because the homunculus du jour had bailed out on me, and the only solace I found lay in the fact that I could hammer that speckled little jackass into the ground with my shoe if I wanted to, and I probably still could.

Things have gotten a lot better since sixth grade. Most of the boys hit puberty and shot up, and most of the boys that didn’t get taller than me learned to deal with that fact gracefully. I’ve dated men of all sizes, and I don’t mind towering over a guy in heels as long as he doesn’t mind; in fact, my first true love was a short redhead. Go figure. Once in a while, though, I run across a Napoleon who can’t deal with a girl taller than him, as if I could control it, as if I grew to my current height with the specific intent of pissing him off and making him feel inadequate. Upon first meeting me, the Napoleon will puff out his chest, and then I know I’m in for it: The Handshake Face-Off. Certain short men have to assert their masculinity with me by gripping my hand so hard that I have to hammer my rings back into shape with a ball-peen hammer afterwards, and since crushing the small bones in my hand totally doesn’t prompt a sudden growth spurt on their part, I don’t see why they bother. I feel like reassuring the Napoleons, telling them that five-ten isn’t all that, that my shirts never have long enough sleeves, that I have to lean down to hear conversations with the same women they chat up with ease, but they wouldn’t want to hear that. The Napoleons would just rather be tall, and I can sympathize, because some days, I’d rather be short. Whenever I’ve just entered hour three of a cross-country flight, I envy women who stand five-four. Their shirts fit. Most men can pick them up – all the way up, not “get them up on tiptoe and then have a back spasm” up – and give them piggyback rides.

But I can touch the ceiling of a subway car standing flat-footed and reach the sauerkraut, and that’ll do nicely.

The tallest woman in the world’s Web site.
Oh, no. No. Not – THE THOMSONS!?

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