Once upon a time, I played squash for Wales. My mum is still a world class vintage player. I throw a mean frisbee, whack a wicked ping pong, toss a good salad. I've been known to dabble in Tai Chi - mainly bend over, asshole to the sun, sphincter warming at sunrise on my roof deck. If I get writer's block, yogic-inversion is a tactic I employ. I also enjoy spinning... like a Dervish...when the Sufi vibe hits me. But gymania - abs, squats, ceps, thrusts - was an alien concept for a Welsh lass used to a daily work out dancing naked, singing into her hairbrush-mic to extremely loud, unrepeatable music.
When I settled into LA LA land at the beginning of 2008, I discovered an African dance class at the infamous gym on Sunset - Crunch. It is wicked. It totally revolutionized the image I had built up about institutionalized "fitness culture". Don't get me wrong, I was still in shock after seeing treadmills with TVs; gay men in their throngs, love muscles gleaming, picking each other up over weight machines; emaciated personal trainers who need to eat some breakfast; camel toes congregating in pilates classes at dawn to compare groove jam; and B-list celebs showering off their fading careers...But I'm happily surprised at how much fun I'm having...I mean, it isn't every day you get to jog next to "The Fly"; share a steam with the hookers from 'Crazy Girl' and watch the producer of 'Scrubs' skip a marathon around the club while resembling an epileptic undergoing exorcism...
'Crunch' is everything my beloved friends back home might suspect would suck me into a downward spiral of cosmetic obsession and physical perfection correction, but instead I've discovered African dance - shaking my batwings to live drums every Sunday morning while flamboyant, sweaty men flex their toned bits through the glass. It rocks. They say, "don't judge a book by its cover" - Crunch is that book that, from the perspective of a naive sheep-shaggin' Welsh chick, looks like a turd with fake boobs in lycra. On closer inspection, it's just a turd like every other turd. After many years of frequenting yoga classes filled with self-conscious, angry, middle class posers repeating the 'namaste' mantra without having a friggin' clue how to translate Sanskrit, it's almost refreshing to be in a happily gay gym where no one's pretending not to be superficial...
© 2008 G3
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