Tales from the Short Bus

In which I regale you with tales from my pilates class. I know I'm going to read about this any day now on this blog, which I've enjoined you all to check out at your convenience. Anyway, this edition of Tales from the Short Bus, features this little maneuver demonstrated below by the much esteemed founder, Joseph Pilates. It's called the Teaser. I have no idea why.

I can't do it.

I've been taking classes for almost two months now, and practicing a couple more times a week between sessions on the treadmill and circuit training. I really like pilates. It focuses on the core, which is one thing I'm shamefully lazy about. What can I say? I find ab work b-o-r-i-n-g and bizarrely feminizing in some way. The point being that I'm in reasonably good shape.

And I can't do it.

The Teaser, that is. In addition to the frustration have having hit a brick wall like this one, it became just a little more humiliating tonight. Perhaps a little explanation? You start off on your back with your chin tucked into your chest. Your arms are straight down at your sides and hovering slightly off the ground. Your feet are pointed and lifted slightly off the ground. Then you simultaneously lift your arms and legs and come up into the position demonstrated above. Go ahead and try it. I can't fucking do it. At some point, my legs won't go up any further without bending slightly, and then once up, they kind of drag me back down, like my ass is a fulcrum. Can you picture this?

Anyway, my pilates instructor is wonderful. She's extremely cool, helpful, rigorous, kind, excellent. And tonight she gave me the ball. I should explain a bit more.

Q and I have a long-standing animosity with an older, heavy-set white man I've dubbed "yacht-guy." Yacht-guy, like most of us, has a sort of standard gym outfit. I tend to wear black pants and a black or grey shirt. Big surprise. Yacht-guy is just as predictable and never seen in anything but one of a series of different, you guessed it, Yacht Club t-shirts tucked into white sweatpants. He and one of his cronies once changed the radio while Q was lifting, and when she changed it back, yelled at her. We're not fans. These kinds of simmering social antagonisms build over time when people have to share space and equipment.

Yacht-guy takes pilates. Tonight, the instructor brought a small beach ball for him to use in performing another maneuver that I can actually do quite well. Again, I refer you to Pilates himself. I think Yacht-guy put it under his lower back to help him get up a little higher. Just when I'm feeling somewhat unjustifiably smug about my old nemesis having to use a ball, she brought it over to me.

Yes, I had to use the ball for the Teaser. She verbally pondered the conundrum. She's genuinely confused about my utter inability to lift my legs and keep them up like I should be able to--like everyone else in the class can. Am I hopelessly disproportionate? This is the possibility that keeps coming up. In other words, it may be that my legs are way too long and my torso way too short to let me get any kind of leverage. Q keeps talking about my center of gravity, but I don't know. The other possibility is that I'm just weak. Thus ends this edition of Tales from the Short Bus.