Hair Balls had to do a double-take (OK, a quadruple-take) when we saw this story about Houstonian Sheyla Hershey’s world-record-nabbing knockers.
On its surface, Hershey’s story is another perfect example of a person doing weird things in order to become reality-show fodder. But a funny thing happened in the course of our interview with the 28-year-old, Brazilian-born Hershey. And by “funny,” we mean “someone get out the fucking stop sign, please.”
Hershey got the world record by adding another thousand CC’s to the 6,000 she was hauling around, thus bumping her up to a magnificent MMM. It was her 32nd cosmetic surgery – a journey that began when she was 21, during the height of depression. When she was nine years old, she caught her first glimpse of Dolly Parton, and she knew she wanted to be like that – no, not a kick-ass singer, songwriter and entertainer…she wanted the jugs. And the tiny waist.
“I had that picture in my head since I was nine,” Hershey told Hair Balls in somewhat broken English. “I even take two ribs out to have the waist of Dolly Parton.”
But prior to the surgeries, there wasn’t one thing Hershey liked about herself.
“I used to break mirrors at home,” she said. “I did not want to go out.
I just…[wanted to] die….I didn’t like myself at all, from the toes to
head….I didn’t have a personality because I couldn’t be happy with
myself….I could not put the clothes on because I was almost 200 lbs. I
was fat, I was flat-chest, I had a nose like a pig-nose. I wasn’t
happy.”
Fortunately, one of her cousins (who lives in Brazil) is a cosmetic
surgeon, so she had the hook-up. But it got to the point where even he
thought enough was enough. That’s when Hershey put him in a tough spot:
she told him that if he didn’t continue with the surgeries, she’d go
somewhere else, and then he’d have to live with the idea of her
possibly dying on someone else’s table.
Hershey’s parents and ten-year-old son aren’t crazy about her life choices, either.
“They don’t like this crazy life that I take, this [risky] life. My
son, he always say ‘You look perfect without those big boobs.’ He
doesn’t like. He thinks it looks ugly. But I don’t care, I like it. I
do it for myself, not for anybody else.”
Last December, when Hershey was about to go under the knife for another
tune-up, doctors discovered she was pregnant. When it was suggested
that she have a reduction in order to better handle things, she
amazingly agreed. (By the way, she’s pregnant with a girl, who’s due in
June. Hershey told Hair Balls, “She isn’t going to need any operation
to be beautiful.”)
Hair Balls hopes Hershey’s prediction is accurate. Because Hershey told
us several times that “I just love to be perfect,” and so far, this
“perfection” has been getting her a lot of attention. It got her a
husband, Derrick, who she met in China while she was modeling and it’s
gotten her plenty of interviews on celebrity trainwreck shows like The
Insider. So why would anyone try to stop her? Everyone’s getting what
they want – Hershey’s found the key to happiness and the media is
getting all the terrible tit puns imagineable.
Yeah, so her son thinks it’s all a bit of a freak show. But what does
he know? And after all, he’s probably a bit biased. He probably loves
his mom for what’s on the inside. And Hershey and everyone around her
have clearly demonstrated how much that’s worth.
— Craig Malisow
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2009.
