Wake Up - I'm Fat

It's okay to feel okay about yourself. That's the message from actress Manheim (on TV's The Practice), which comes across more strongly in her first-person tales of being an overweight person than it ever could from a more traditional self-empowerment audio program. ""Everyone can find a reason to hate themselves,"" Manheim opines, and for her, ""fat equaled hate."" Today, she sounds amazingly self-confident, poised and full of sass: no one better stand in her way. But it wasn't easy getting to this point. She tells of her childhood in Peoria, Ill., her young years as a would-be hippie California motorcycle mama and her struggles as a drama graduate student at NYU. In all these life phases, she met with prejudices against her; it only got worse when she became an actress and found herself constantly stereotyped in the role of the ""butt-of-the-joke fat girl."" Through doing her own one-woman show at New York's Public Theater, she was able to get beyond that impasse, raise people's consciousness and triumph as advocate and role model. Spoken audio is a similarly perfect soapbox oratory medium for Manheim--and she attacks her reading with a palpable fierceness of purpose. Based on the 1999 Broadway hardcover. (May)