15-Humiliation continues with attempt at exercise/dance class

As if it wasn’t bad enough to be recognized, naked, by someone I know in the women’s sauna last week, this week I have furthered my self-humiliation with an attempt at an Latin-dance-inspired exercise class  that begins with the letter Z (insert registered trademarked symbol here).

This sounds like fun, instead of just “sweatin’ to the oldies.”  I need fun in my exercise or I won’t do it.

This was fun, alright, as in funny.  As in odd and ha-ha.

The class was just fine.  Just so you can imagine the type of moves, here is a link to Rob Lowe, Kelly Ripa, the Z founder and a woman named Vanessa in high stiletto heels – I kid you not – trying this:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNZbU7QDkrA

The funny part was me.

A very fit instructor led about eight women in a room that, unfortunately, has full-length mirrors on one wall.  Since I am not a ballerina, it’s a bad sign when I show up and have to face those.

It’s worse when you are wearing a large hot pink tee shirt (pretty new) and the same gym shorts you have had at least since 2005 when you took the boys on a summer trip to Michigan, because there is a photo of all you together at the Sleeping Bear Dunes and you are wearing those shorts. 

Apparently in the last three decades since I tried an organized exercise class, women have changed to leotard-like pants.  I’m thinking they fit sort of like that Spanx-knockoff undergarment I tried a couple years ago, which I could not pull up past my knees. 

They also have on sleeveless tank-tops – sometimes in layers of two or more, which I do not understand (isn’t one shirt enough?).  And they appear to require special undergarments I am pretty sure I don’t own (surprised?).  That is always a bad sign, too, when you are the only person in the room who clearly didn’t get the memo on the dress code.

So the class begins, and it is clear almost immediately that I must be exercise dyslexic.  I simply cannot follow the verbal directions and the instructor’s movements at the same time, especially if she is facing us.  Everyone else is going left, and I’m going right.  They are kicking their right feet, and I am kicking my left.  Two beats late.  If I eventually sort-of get the footsteps, then I cannot at all get it when you add the arms (though I can walk and chew gum). 

And this is not just moving…this is sort of gyrating and shimmying in what I am imagining could possibly be a sexually attractive way – at least for the muscular instructor, who is not dressed all wrong, fumbling around and looking like an idiot.  And just when I start to get the step, at about the eighth time, the instructor changes to something else.  So I never get better. 

Does this bother me?  Actually, I found it absolutely hilarious.  All the other women are sort of doing the same thing, rotating their hips and shaking their shoulders, and there I am, flailing away and out of sync.  Oh, yes, I can laugh at myself (don’t you try it, however).  I can laugh, and I do, ‘til I am nearly crying.

This becomes even funnier to me as a vision comes into my mind:  what if I was leading the class?  I now picture some sort of odd Saturday Night Live-esque skit (or maybe Monty Python…the Ministry of Silly Walks) where a rather enlarged and poorly-dressed Kristen Wiig is leading a room full of svelte, well-dressed women who cannot possibly follow what she is doing, because she doesn’t know what she is doing.  This strikes me as even more hilarious.

Despite the patented moves and enjoyable Latin music, I find this is similar to an aerobics class and friend and I tried at the University of Minnesota fieldhouse (which I do not believe exists now) in the mid 1980s.  Aerobics were getting popular and she had a couple free passes, and we figured we wouldn’t know anyone on the large university campus, so what the hey?

It was the same sort of tragi-comedy, where we couldn’t keep up, despite our best efforts .  My friend lived in an expansion bungalow where her bedroom was upstairs.  The morning after, she called me in a bit of a panic.  “I cannot get down the stairs!”  Neither of us could hardly move.

I may be wrong, but I do not think I will be totally incapacitated tomorrow.  The worst may be my stomach, which is not used to so much laughter.  At the end, the instructor noted before I left, “You had a fun time!  Come back!”  That was very generous of her.

In the locker room, one of the other participants and I got talking and she said I "don't worry about what you are wearing, that doesn’t matter.”

She has been attending a class three times a week for the last four months.  She loves it.  She showed that love in her trade-marked logo shirt, featuring the name of the Z class.

And, without having altered her diet or other habits dramatically, she has lost 20 pounds.

If that isn’t inspirational, I don’t know what is.

We’ll see whether I am in pain in the morning, and, if so, how much.  And what the new clothes cost.  And where you get them, and if you have to try them on. 

Jury is still out, organized classes may not be for me.  But it was the cheapest comedy hour I have ever had.  I could be laughing all the way to a smaller sized leotard.