The 1999 movie “Fight Club,” is a non-stop sociopathic riot based on the idea that moral and intellectual liberation comes from beating one of your fellow club members to a bloody pulp while the rest of the club members watch. Any male who subscribed to this unusual philosophy was welcome to join. While joining this club is not on my own list of pressing needs, it does represent one end of the club spectrum: a club defined by who its members are.

But that is not the only kind of club that exists. My kind of club is encapsulated in the famous dictum of Groucho Marx: “I do not choose to belong to any club that would accept ME as a member.”  Right on! I want to belong to a club that is defined not by who belongs to it, but by whom it excludes. A cool kids club, like a country club or the Hell’s Angels or the Mafia.

Regretably, many of us do not have the money to join a country club, the motorcycle and accoutrements (boots, leather jacket, chain, switchblade, axe, and machine gun) to join the Hell’s Angels, or the Sicilian background to join the Mafia. This leaves us in something of a quandary.

However, I have come upon a solution, which will provide some of you with a path to exclusivity.  I am starting my own highly exclusive club. In order to remedy the gap in the social panorama left vacant by Fight Club, I am starting FOUP Club. FOUP? What the hell is FOUP? you ask. Let me enlighten you, Dear Reader.

FOUP (rhymes with “soup”) is an acronym for Fat Old Ugly People.

Think about it. There are many fat people. There are many old people. God knows, there are many ugly people. But only a select few combine all three characteristics. Face it, if you are fat, you will probably not get old because you will drop dead of coronary artery disease, diabetes, or by being buried in the debris of a building which has collapsed under your weight. If you are ugly, there is a high probability that you will expire by flinging yourself off a high precipice when you are rejected for the umpteenth time by a member of the opposite sex. Old takes care of itself — just wait.

FOUP’s have a variety of ways to be rejected by the membership committees of other clubs. They want their members to be slim, beautiful, ageless people. They believe that they can dictate the canons of desirability to the rest of us.  Nonsense! We FOUP’s can seize the reins of social power, and grind the young, skinny, beautiful people into the dirt.

All that we need to do is begin to announce that we have rejected applications for membership by Claudia Schiffer, Angelina Jolie, Garth Brooks, and a few others. This does not have to be true; all we need is a publicist to get it bruited about in the leading literary publications, like Cosmopolitan, People, the National Enquirer, and the like. Soon the story will be picked up by Fox News, MSNBC, and the Drudge Report. Suddenly, FOUP’s will become in, trendy, the objects of insane jealousy, courted by late night talk shows, and offered eight figure book deals. Our membership committee (me) will be inundated with applications, 99.5% of which we will reject by sending the applicants insulting, smarmy letters telling them that they are undesirable swine, too thin, too young, and too beautiful to consort with the likes of us. Put on forty-five pounds, we will tell them, age fifteen years (or at least look it), and undo those nose jobs, facelifts and tummy tucks and then perhaps we will talk to you.

And while they are struggling mightily to meet our outrageous demands, we will all go on diets, visit the plastic surgeon, and have the playing field all to ourselves.

Ha ha!!