Through Thick And Thicker

Dr. Ramon Duke’s address to the 2012 BBW INFLATE! Conference

Transcribed by Latecomer

(JENN B.) Now before we continue with tonight’s program I have a couple of important announcements to make. First, I’m sure you all will be pleased to hear that because of the overwhelming response to yesterday’s bra fitting clinic, Debra Holstein of ExpandoBra had agreed to stay over and run a second session tomorrow morning in Conference Room B for all of you who wanted to attend but couldn’t get a spot. Signups are on the boards next to the coffee and tea in the main lobby, and remember to please specify whether you’ll need a gas bottle or if you plan on bringing your own. Go for it, girls!

Second, we’re rescheduling the morning dive rescue training lessons in Pool Two for the afternoon to give the maintenance guys a chance to fix the pool heater so you girls won’t all freeze your tushies off like you did today. To do this we’ll be moving the afternoon certification clinic for sex therapy assistants to the morning session in Conference Room A. Hope that works for you.

Now our guest speaker tonight is someone whose products I’m sure every one of you here in the audience has used at one time or another, either to stay afloat while skin diving, to add a few extra inches here or there, or to shoot for a new ballooning duration record at the Inflation Olympics. So without further ado let me introduce to you the inventor of the world’s most popular line of inflation pumps and accessories, Doctor RAMON DUKE of BBW ASSIST Corporation! Give it up for the Doc!

(applause. JENN B yields podium to DUKE, exits stage)

(DR.DUKE) Thanks Jenn and thank you all so much for inviting me to speak to you tonight, it’s a great honor to be here and meet so many happy customers.  It’s kind of scary, I’ve never addressed this big a crowd before so I’m hoping that the majority of you really are happy customers otherwise I’m in big trouble up here!

(laughter)

What I wanted to share with you tonight are a few stories about how I got started in this business that I hope will interest and perhaps amuse you. I’ve never discussed these things in public before so maybe you should shut the doors at the back of the hall so nobody else can hear, because what follows will be just between you and me.

(JENN B., from the back of the hall) Sure!

First of all I’ll answer for you a question that I get asked almost everywhere I go, it’s kind of silly but I do want to get it out of the way. It is indeed true that I am the brother of the “other” doctor Duke, Raoul Duke, the writer and drinking buddy of the late great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and the less said about that the better!

(laughter)

Now Raoul and I are as different as it is possible to be and still be brothers so I hope this confession will not color your assessment of me in any way. But I do want you to know that he has personally taught me how to forge the signature he uses for book-signings and given me a hundred copies of his newly-released memoirs, My Years With The Gonzo, to try and sell in the lobby after this talk so I hope to see you there after this is over tonight! Just look for the table in the lobby with a big pile of cheap-looking books on it. You can’t miss it, it will be right next to the pastry cart…

(laughter)

So… How is it that a skinny engineer would wind up getting all mixed up in the special needs of big girls like you? I’ve thought a lot about this over the years and it all started while I was still in high school if you can believe that (yeah, I was a nerd inventor long before it became fashionable). I was tinkering with the design of a portable, shallow-dive hookah respirator which you might recognize today as the SkinDive Triple if you were to ever take one apart and look inside. Although it’s been improved and revised with each passing year and is now available in a variety of special models, deep down inside it’s the same basic design that I came up with back in 1969 and which has been in our product catalog since we started the business  in 1974 or something like that.

Anyway, one afternoon my older sister invited a bunch of her friends over to our house to stop in on their way to the swimming pool in our neighborhood. I had seen these girls before of course but never in bathing suits and being 16 at the time meant that when they came in the front door that afternoon it made a big impression on me. Now one of those girls- we’ll call her “Gail”, because that was her name (no just kidding), she was not only the cutest of all of them but she was also really, really chubby as well as being, shall we say, significantly more developed for her age than the others, and when I saw her in her swimsuit I almost had a heart attack. I actually had to go back to my bedroom and close the door for a minute to catch my breath because I thought I was going to die.  

(laughter, whistles)

Of course now I know I was falling in love but back then I was just this shy nerdy kid and that’s all I want to say about that to you tonight.

(laughter, shouts of “awwww…”)

But anyway I tagged along with them to the pool, playing the role of the awkward kid brother, not to swim or anything like that but just to sit under a tree and watch them from a safe distance. And that’s when I started to notice some other important things about Gail.

First of all she didn’t want to venture into the deep end of the pool, even though she could swim like a seal. The others would splash their way towards the diving boards but Gail didn’t. They tried to get her to follow them but the best she could do was to inch her way along by hanging onto the gutter at the edge of the pool. She never let go of the gutter for as long as she was in water that was over her head.

Secondly, although the rest of the girls got a big charge out of jumping off the diving board, Gail never tried that. The board was high enough off the water that if you just hopped off the end of it with your toes pointing down you could actually touch the bottom which was 12 feet. No amount of teasing and cajoling would change her mind about the diving board.

The third thing I noticed about her was that when the girls played that game where they see who can hold their breath under water the longest, Gail always lost and was the first to pop back to the surface, gasping for air.

And that wasn’t all (What? What did…  oh) Well yes to answer your question, I was a indeed  a “very careful observer”, after all that’s how you learn things isn’t it? And in any case as far as this thing with Gail was concerned, I was very strongly motivated to observe carefully I guess you could say.

(laughter, scattered applause)

Anyway, thank you… I’m staying tonight in room 1408 if any of you… yes anyway, the last thing I remember noticing about her that afternoon all those years ago was that when one of the mean girls who was not part of my sister’s crowd tried to grab Gail and pull her down off her feet and hold her under water, she completely panicked and in her struggle to break free she actually managed to kick the other girl in the nose hard enough to give her a nosebleed. Gail was really, really scared. So naturally  the mean girl cried and the lifeguard kicked all of them out of the pool and on the way back to our house, the mean girl and her friends followed behind and gave Gail a real ration of grief for being a “big  fat whale girl.”

Pretty quiet in the room right now, isn’t? You’ve probably all been there at one time or another. I know. I watched Gail put up with that and since I was just a skinny punk sophomore and the mean crowd were all seniors from the cheerleading squad with football boyfriends, I did nothing to protect her from them and after we got home I went back into my bedroom and listened to chubby Gail cry in the kitchen while the other girls tried to console her. And I felt really, really rotten that afternoon for not doing anything.

After that incident I started paying more attention to the big girls I saw at the pool and noticed similarities between their behavior and Gail’s and that’s when I realized that I could help them- certainly not in the sense of guarding them from the mean girls, but in the sense of making them more comfortable in the water. I could change the design of the valves on my shallow dive respirator, make it adjustable so the girl who was using it could get enough extra air if she needed it to help stay afloat. Then she wouldn’t be afraid of sinking in the deep end of the pool and she could stay under water as long as she wanted without having to hold her breath.

So I did that, specifically redesigned the thing for use by big girls and as you know it was a great success, and soon we discovered that there were other places beside swimming pools where the big girls had special needs that this sort of product could address and the company took off and the rest is history, blah blah blah. But now I am going to reveal to you my biggest secret from those days, something that I wanted to do back then and which I incorporated into the inner workings of my first air supply pump and each of the ones which followed it- something inspired by Gail, which she of course knew nothing about because it was, after all a secret, but here it is:

Gail was a big girl, but I wanted to help make her BIGGER. Because if I could make her bigger, then she’d be even cuter, and then I’d want to make her even bigger, and then she’d be even cuter and… well you get the idea… and maybe I’d be able to treat myself to that heart attack after all!

(laughter, whistles)

Yes… So the valve arrangement necessary to do this, what I called the “cute valve”, was a simple modification to the basic design and I could hide it in there and later, when the buoyancy enhancers gained market acceptance and we had an installed base,  we could branch out and serve a completely different set of needs with the same basic device. Hidden inside each dive respirator was the heart and soul of an inflation pump. Nobody else in the business caught on to that, and once we introduced the PlumpPrincess and began offering the PlumpUp modification kit for people who had already bought one of our diving respirators, we had no competition. And you girls made us a success.

And that’s the story- except for one very important part I have left out until now, the one loose end we need to tie up here tonight to get a perfectly happy ending to it. Can you guess what it is? Come on guys, you gotta guess…

(voices from audience: “Gail?” “What happened to Gail?”)

What happened to Gail. Right. So what happened to Gail, and this really isn’t that much of a secret except what happened that afternoon at the pool, is that Gail volunteered to test my first pump and tell me how to get the valves set properly so she would feel safe and comfortable while using it. Which she did.  Now that took a significant amount of courage, not just on my part to broach the subject with her, but on her part too, because she was taking all the risk of something going wrong while I was running the pumps and setting the valves and whatnot. But all of you then became the beneficiaries of that work, and Gail’s courage contributed so much to the success of the product line. In fact, every mask, mouthpiece, hose harness, the whole shebang- Gail tested them first, and told me what to fix.

And she still does. To this day. Yes- THAT Gail. You know her as our chief model… and my wife…

(wild applause and cheers as GAIL struts out onto stage under the follow spot, resplendent in a gold satin swimdress and white high heeled boots)

And… and yes thank you, and you know what the deal clincher was? What made Gail decide to stick with me, a skinny nerd, through thick and thicker?

(More cheers, GAIL, radiant and beaming with pride, sidles up close to DUKE)

The big secret: the first time she tried out my first pump, just before we were finished, I reached over and when she wasn’t looking… I opened the cute valve. Just a little teensy bit at first, and then more, later… which had the same effect on Gail as this, which she taught me how to do:

(DUKE inhales deeply, turns towards GAIL who moves in expectantly, lips parted, eyes closed, DUKE locks her in an inescapable blowkiss and exhales forcefully. She coos luxuriantly, eyelashes fluttering, wiggles her hips and expands. Several more breaths and she is full to bursting. Her erect nipples show plainly through the swimsuit fabric, stretched tightly across her huge breasts. Crowd comes to its feet, cheers wildly)

Through thick and thicker! Thank you and…

(more wild cheering)

Good night to you all, you’ve been great!

(DUKE, hand in hand with GAIL, helps her waddle off stage in her heels. GAIL waves to crowd as the stage lights go down)