a bit bigger,’ I say, and it’s an understatement.
‘Which is fine. But she was plenty big before.’
Hmm. I’m not convinced.
This is as far as I feel I’m going to get with Woody. The best I can say about him is that he isn’t breaking any laws. But I do feel their relationship is unequal, and unbalanced, like Minka’s very body. I just hope at some point she does retire, because although material comfort is alluring to almost all of us, I feel that for Minka it’s reached the point at which the material stuff is the tail that wags the dog of their life. Before I leave to pack my bags in my tiny room in one of the Pyramids, I put this to her. Wouldn’t she give up the endless strain on her upper body and having to sit by the pool, naked, in her fifties, sixties and even seventies, being photographed for her website by her husband who’s telling her, ‘Close up. Smile. OK. Turn your butt around…’ Wouldn’t she rather be playing tennis?
‘When I am playing tennis I am not in the business. Sometime I wanna get out from, you know, I am telling you true, do I love it tennis? I love it. Just bottom line is money.’ She says, wiping a bead or two of sweat from her brow.
‘But wouldn’t you rather live in a small house and drive an old car and then only play tennis?’
‘No, no,’ she says.
I have my answer, but it’s not the one, for her sake, I really want to hear.
Taking one last glance at Minka’s iconic décolletage, my eyes are once again assaulted by the stretched, veiny horror of Minka’s chest. Brutal, barbaric, inhuman; none of these words overstates the case. The idea that anyone would consider going even a millimetre bigger than this is unthinkable. But these journeys are all about the unthinkable. Meet Sheyla, a young Brazilian television celebrity, who’s about to have an operation that will give her an extra litre and a half of size per breast on top of what Minka has. That’s five and a half litres per breast. And she’s almost as petite as Minka. What’s she thinking? Can I stop her? The flight’s booked; I’m on my way…
PART 2
The World’s Most Enhanced Woman Sheyla Hershey’s story
Well, if Minka is a living legend, and a symbol of a bygone era in terms of enhanced women, Brazilian model and media personality Sheyla Hershey is distinctly about the twenty-first century. Just twenty-three, she boasts a reality show in the US and can even more proudly boast she hasn’t so much as taken her top off. Not that the images I see online leave much to the imagination. Pouting glumly at the camera, she looks like a bleach-blonde equivalent of Posh Spice, but one whose figure suggests she’s enjoyed rather a few more steak dinners than Posh has. She is perhaps aping the Marilyn Monroe shape, but with two distinct additions that would have Norma Jean turning in her Hollywood grave. Sheyla lives in Houston, Texas from where she earns an apparently decent living modelling and making numerous TV appearances, including her own reality strand on CBS television. There are lots of references to her online as the Brazilian Jordan – God what a thought.
So why am I swelling my carbon footprint further, to meet this woman? She is, at this moment, flying to Brazil to have another breast augmentation. This, if it goes the way she wants it to go, will increase her breast size to 55 cubic centilitres per breast, which would be a world record. It’s too good an opportunity, in exploring this world of enhanced women and what motivates them, to meet a woman who is in the process of getting bigger, or indeed about to be the biggest. Who knows, I might even be able to talk her out of it…
Sheyla’s flying back to Brazil, to a beach town called Villa Bella on the north-east coast of Brazil, where her sister lives. I fly from Vegas to Houston and we then meet up and fly together to Brazil. I was quite anxious about whether she would actually catch the flight, as up until now, on the phone and on email, she’s been mercurial to say the least. But something told me, particularly after looking at her website (which is a masterclass in self-promotion), that this was another media appearance she wasn’t going to miss.
I wander around Houston Airport, dazed by a heady mix of jetlag and weak American lager. And there she is, standing outside a Hudson News, looking lost. And glamorous. She’s wearing what looks like a woollen bra, in tartan, and a matching miniskirt approximately one centimetre in length. All the clothes look incredibly tiny. In keeping with the Mrs Beckham theme, it looks like she has stolen one of Posh’s outfits and forgotten she is a size 12, not a size 6. Her skin is caked in a glutinous light-brown make-up/fake tan. She looks like her entire body has been dipped in a vat of the caramel bit of a Cadbury’s Caramel. Her hair is blonde and brittle; I’d suggest it’s been so long since it was the colour God intended that now even God can’t remember what colour it was supposed to be. She’s wearing heels that approximate in height to all the Harry Potter books piled on top of each other, and her ability to stand for more than five seconds in them involves a similarly impressive amount of wizardry. And her breasts…
Ah yes. Her breasts. Why we’re here. Well, they are very large. But they are not on the Minka scale. Instead she looks like a sexually frustrated cartoonist’s impression of a woman. Like a supersized Jessica Rabbit crossed with a Russ Meyer actress, and a bit of Babs Windsor thrown in for good measure. And there is something comical looking about this lady and it’s not just her top-heavy profile. She looks more like a character than a real person. She is a sort of walking human caricature. And I’m about to get on an airplane with her. Fortunately we are allocated seats at separate ends of the plane, allowing me to keep my powder dry in terms of questions and avoiding a syndrome the great Les Dawson used to refer to as ‘having the fight before you get in the ring’. I sip my Caffeine Free Diet Coke, thus experiencing no physical emotion whatsoever and wait for the hours to pass, only to be occasionally stirred by the sight of the inflated, tartan-clad blonde making her way to the loo. In the context of this flight, she is a vision, an airbrushed, bouncing bombshell, clashing wildly with the grey plastic backdrop of this American Airlines 737 and its jaded passengers.
We arrive in Brazil, and she seems to perk up once she strides into the airport. Every footstep of her faux Jimmy Choos can be heard for miles. The shrill clatter of her heels announces that Sheyla’s coming home. She is speaking at double speed, perspiring slightly, and is fidgety. It feels like she is morphing into her public persona and is somehow preparing to put on a show. As we walk through the sliding doors into the public part of the airport, there is the sound of shrieking and general excitement. They are calling out her name. Flashguns on cameras are splashing light onto both of us, and I’m feeling like a spare part, knowing they’re not here for me, but I’m there anyway – a feeling Denis Thatcher undoubtedly had for about three decades. There are perhaps thirty people gathered, with all permutations of camera equipment with which to capture the moment. Bizarrely, in the mêlée, a woman rushes up to me and gives me a hug! Now this is my first time in Brazil, so perhaps this is what happens. Or maybe she has never seen someone quite so tall, thin and pale in her country before, and feels the need to touch me to see if I’m real. With a little help from Sheyla as interpreter, it transpires that Balls of Steel – a late-night TV comedy show I presented for Channel 4, is shown in Brazil. This is a surreal interruption to an otherwise surreal arrival. Luckily Balls of Steel appears not to be a ratings monster here, as, apart from some odd looks and whispering in an elevator later that day, that’s the last time my global fame is to interrupt this journey.
There are placards with Sheyla’s name scrawled across them, being held aloft. Quite poorly scrawled. It always amazes me that people who make placards, in all walks of life, couldn’t have a better sense of production value. Be it striking workers, protesting students or celebrating football fans, I’m always wondering whatever happened to good quality marker pens, and fabric suited to the painting materials being deployed. And couldn’t
