Join the Party!

I wrote you a joke today. Wanna hear it? What do you call a room of 38 people who can’t dance? A Zumba Class!

I have now taken one and a half Zumba classes, as research for you, because that’s the kind of person I am. Zumba is to the middle aged woman of the 2000’s what Jazzercise was to the middle aged woman of the 1970’s, and by that, I mean it is a form of public humiliation akin to a vertical seizure that won’t actually make you any healthier or thinner. And by that, I mean younger.

Zumba is touted to be a fun fitness dance craze that combines a bunch of dance styles that you don’t know how to do, including some that you haven’t even heard of. An instructor with way more coordination that you leads the class, taking you through a sequence of exciting moves that you are genetically unable to mimic, all set to music that is a mélange of Latin, tropical, and African beats and rhythms, none of which you will be able to identify. It will remind you of Gloria Estefan, The Gypsy Kings, or Jose Feliciano, but you won’t recognize any of it. You won’t even recognize the lyrics, except for the word Zumba, which, I hate to break it to you, isn’t even a real word.

But who cares, because it’s fun, right? That kind of depends on your definition of fun. Are you a true one-of-a-kind individual? Do you like to dance to the beat of your own drummer? Do you like to surround yourself with other people who also are dancing to their own beat? What if some of those people are dancing off-beat? Do you like that?

If so, then come on in, there’s room for you in Zumba, right next to the one old white man who is wearing black socks and a knee brace. He’s been so lonely since his wife died, but look at him now! Look at how he swivels his hips, hips which have yet to see a fracture! He’s not afraid of looking stupid, no-sir-ee. He’s got the moves to help him meet the next Mrs. Right, that special someone to hold his hand and eventually wipe his mouth and ass. And what self-confidence, to be the only man in a sea of mostly post-menopausal women! Those are some big balls, my friend, even if they do dangle down to the bottom of his gym shorts.

Maybe you haven’t tried Zumba yet because you are intimidated by trying to learn a complicated dance routine. It’s so much to remember, and what fun is that? No worries, because there are no instructions! That’s right. Your so-called “instructor” doesn’t explain any of the moves to you, nor does she cue what is coming next. She just dances, and hopefully you will follow along. If you don’t, too bad, maybe you’ll get it the next time around. She is on a roll, and there ain’t no stopping her now. So you better hope you can see her from where you are standing. If you forgot your contacts or get trapped behind the tubby woman in the visor, you can forget it. You are lost, and you will remain so. Don’t get mad, though, Gilligan, just try to pick a person near you that looks like she knows what she is doing and imitate her. The only person who can really do any of the moves is the instructor, and she isn’t going to share her secrets. So it’s okay to fake it. This isn’t an orgasm or anything, it’s just Zumba!


Will you burn calories? Of course, how can you not? After all, you can burn calories while you sleep, and this is much more interactive than sleeping, unless you are an extraordinarily restless sleeper. Don’t you burn more calories eating celery than the celery actually contains? You might not burn off that Pop-tart you stuffed down in the car on the way to the gym, but you will certainly use up the pack of Splenda in your Venti soy latte. Good for you! With all those dramatic arm movements, hip thrusts, toe taps, and jump steps, you are getting leaner by the minute. You’ll be ready for Carnival in Rio in no time, or maybe your nephew’s bar mitzvah. What could make him prouder than his aunt doing the stanky leg with the rabbi?

What are you waiting for? Grab your wrist bands, put on your free t-shirt from the blood drive, and head to the nearest senior community center or church basement. Somewhere, when you least expect it, a Zumba class is about to begin. Don’t miss it. Just be sure to take a shot of something before you get there. Drinking water is encouraged, but alcohol, not so much. You would think that a few sips of a nice Chablis or tequila would get the crowd moving, maybe even make them more coordinated, but most places that are open for business in the morning frown upon alcohol before noon.

So be prepared, because that old man next to you might drop down on one knee, and not just because his heart gave out.

Water (B)Logged

Ahh, the beginning of my fall vacation. S, my younger daughter, and E, my older daughter, went back to school this week. Overall, we had a marvelous summer together. They didn’t try to kill each other, not even last week when we were all on each other’s nerves, and I didn’t try to kill either one of them nor the man who impregnated me. So it was a success.

We started the summer with a trip to the beach, which is a great time to go because a lot of people push that beach trip back to right before school starts in August. The end of the summer is also when the jellyfish go on vacation, so waiting until then can be a big mistake. But that first week in June isn’t too crowded and isn’t too hot and my family isn’t too sick of one another yet. We went on a bigger trip to Washington DC the same month, which wasn’t the best plan, looking back, but we had a wonderful trip anyway. July came and went with more camp and another trip to the beach, which was both too hot and too crowded, and overall, too soon. Still, we enjoyed ourselves, which is good, because that is an awful lot of together travel time for it to be torture.

Then came August, the last two weeks of summer before school started. No camp. No beach trip. No trip of any kind. Just me and my girls. I expected that we would get really tired of spending all day together, every day, and fight and bicker and bitch. The end of the summer is tough anyway, because everyone is sick of the heat, sick of the pool, and sick of each other’s faces. But I held out hope that we would survive, and as it turned out, we had a few things on our to-do list we never got a chance to do. We did fit in a good many last minute play dates, though, as well as the obligatory trip to the local water park.

Water park is a generous term for the things we have in our area. When you think water park, you might conjure up great attractions like Blizzard Beach at Walt Disney World, or Wild Waters, or any of the lesser water parks associated with country music stars. Well, our local water parks are just fancy neighborhood pools. They have one or two water slides, an extremely lazy river, and a watery playground for the kiddies. They don't have a wave pool or gift shop, but they do have a small snack bar and a "no outside food" policy. These water parks are not an all day amusement, but they are cheap and less than a half an hour from home, so what more could I ask for?

We decided to give Shipwreck Cove a try. It was the first time we have been there, and lucky for me, JR and lil JR, her two year old, went along for the ride. Their presence meant I didn’t have to spend all day there, since lil JR still requires a daily nap and JR won’t allow lil JR to eat any of the crap they sell at the snack bar. We loaded up the car with our towels and sunscreen and off we drove, into the middle of nowhere. We didn’t bother with the GPS, and we got distracted before we remembered to follow the MapQuest directions, but luckily, there was an occasional road sign to give us enough help so that we didn’t accidentally stumble onto someone’s meth lab trailer.

We got there right after it opened so we could spend a good two hours there, which is all anyone really needs at a water park. We put our valuables in a rusty locker, found some unclaimed lounge chairs for our towels, and assessed the situation. The watery playground seemed like a great place to start since it was right up lil JR’s alley. It had a fake deserted island with misters hidden in the tree tops and a pirate ship with a couple of baby slides and a little watery bridge between them. I loved the pirate ship. Instead of a beautiful maiden gracing its hull, it had an overly muscular, shirtless, all gold Neptune/Pirate figure, sort of a Blackbeard with six-pack abs and the Midas touch. All around us, little redneck children crawled and shoved and pushed their way around the playground, because taking turns and waiting is so elitist. Really, with all the squirting water and wet little bodies sliding around, it was a pedophile's dream.

Alas, all that chaos got annoying pretty fast, so we worked our way over to the laziest river. We each grabbed a tube except for lil JR, who desperately wanted to grab one even though the tube was twice as big as she is and she can’t swim. Not being able to swim didn’t stop the little boy who clung to S’s tube. S’s asked him nicely to let go of her tube twice, which he refused to do, so she shoved him off of it instead. Then we watched him not know how to swim, panic, and go under. I grabbed the tube and pulled him up, showing him how to hang on to the handles, and asked him if he wanted me to help him, which he did. The next thing you know, I am going around the laziest river with someone else’s kid while my own kid looked at me from her new tube, confused and disgusted that I was helping a perfect stranger instead of bobbing along happily with her.

JR worked her way over to us, lil JR perched in front of her like a smug parrot, and told me that she had already pulled that kid out once. I asked him if he knew how to swim, but he wasn’t able to articulate a coherent answer, so I asked him if he was at the park with his mother. He claimed that he was, which I found out later wasn’t true. He was actually with a day care group, led by some high school dropout types who were too busy picking their nails and gossiping than supervising the children they were paid to watch. We floated past a bored lifeguard sporting a deep tan and a Rebel flag pendant which went nicely with his red swim trunks. After our one trip around the river, I worked my way over to the steps, where I persuaded the little boy to get a life vest and left him on back on shore, alone, while I rejoined my children. That was enough good deed for the day.

We attempted the water slides next. We all trudged over to the steps and stood in line, until we reached the top. JR and lil JR were immediately turned away for being too shrimpy, which would have been nice for them to know before they stood in that line. When it was my turn, I sat down in the chute and got a big faceful of water. I had remembered to wear glasses instead of my contacts, so while I needed windshield wipers, at least I didn’t lose my precious gas permeables to the splashdown at the bottom. What a splashdown it was, too! I sank like a cell phone in a toilet when I hit the water before rising to the surface and paddling my way over to the steps, which were blocked by an old man who didn’t understand he was not in the lap pool area despite being yelled at repeatedly by the lifeguards.

After that fun, we bobbed around in the regular pool for a while, watching the wild children be wild and their frightening parents alternate between ignoring them and screaming at them. Luckily, no used bandages floated by, and JR and I were able to enjoy the silverback gorilla coats, bad tattoos, and fat aprons of the other adults. We discreetly played a few rounds of name that genetic disorder, and then we did it all again, the playground, the lazy river, the water slides. I started to get a little bored, so when lil JR and S complained about being hungry, I was the first one out of the pool.

After changing our clothes in the nasty bathroom (is there such a thing as a pleasant water park bathroom?), we reloaded the car and meandered our way back home, only to find that JR lived really close to it. I know I couldn’t find it again; with my sense of direction, I am lucky I remember JR’s house, and I’ve been there a bunch of times.

That was the last hurrah of our summer. I developed a nice summer cold the day after Shipwreck Cove, courtesy I am sure of one of those germ carriers I encountered in the pool. And here I thought they didn’t have any souvenirs.

Hitting the Pavement

I learned how to ride my bike in Florida. Nice, flat, even Florida. To be honest, I don’t even remember who taught me how to ride, although I seriously doubt it was my mother. As far as I know, she has never ridden a bike. I’ve never seen her on one, anyway. I imagine I just spontaneously understood the whole thing, the balancing, the pedaling, the stopping without flying over the handle bars. I had those cool spoke decorations that looked like segments of straws, and I don’t exactly recall, but there might have been a banana seat involved.

As an adult, I don’t ride my bike often. I have a shitty mountain bike I bought at Kmart back in 1993, when that was all I could afford. I rode it around my apartment complex in Charleston, also a level ground location, but like Florida, it was humid as a bain marie and left me feeling like I was cooking a flan in my armpits. I moved to Phoenix soon after, and my husband and I finally got to see what mountain biking was all about. We took our bikes over to South Mountain Park not far from our apartment and attempted our first mountain ride. It took us twenty minutes to pedal to where the trail began, going slightly uphill. When we got to the start of the trail head, I had to get off my bike and dry heave behind a cactus. When my breathing returned to a normal wheeze, we got back on our bikes and rode downhill towards the parking lot. I was convinced that at any second, I would hit a rock and go hurtling off the side of the mountain to my death. The excruciating twenty minute ride uphill was an embarrassing five minute ride downhill. Our bikes remained parked for the rest of the year we lived in Phoenix. We felt justified because it was too damn hot to do much of anything there except watch television and discover new ice cream shops.

Now I live in Greenville, South Carolina, a small city with beautiful rolling foothills which are deceptively steep. I have attempted hauling that old mountain bike out a few times, but the childhood thrill of coasting down the road with the wind blowing back my hair has morphed into a more adult phobia of terrifying freewheeling which will lead to massive head trauma. Instead, I stick to spin class at the gym. Sure, I have heard of people careening over their stationary handlebars while sprinting or getting ripped by a wayward pedal when their shoe flies out of the cage. But most of the injuries seem to be less obvious, like sore asses and tweaked knee ligaments. Plus, I can sit near a fan in the dark and pretend I am riding fast, the wind in my hair, a kid again, and not worry about dog attacks or getting flattened by a Lincoln Navigator.

Unfortunately, my two daughters have inherited my healthy dislike of potential injuries. At 10 and 8, they still do not know how to ride their bikes. It’s not like my husband and I didn’t try to teach them how to ride. We started out with the basic tricycle, moved on to a Big Wheel, threw in a Care Bear scooter and a Little Tikes Little Red Coupe, all the while trying to encourage a love of independence and of physical exercise, in a way that didn’t involve my hovering around them like a human safety net. They even had little bikes with little training wheels, the size a three year old might ride, if a three year old wasn’t paralyzed by a fear of subdermal hematoma.

When they each turned six, we presented them with “big girl” bikes, to which we then added training wheels. The training wheels never worked well because they were too small for the bikes, and the girls never wanted to try because the wobbling was more than they could bear. Sure, once a year or so we would get all helmeted up and head outside, but then fear would overtake E and S and the screaming and crying would follow. It was all I could do to get E to sit and balance with me holding on to both the handlebars and the back of the seat. S tended to not be as scared as E, but if her big sister wasn’t going to do it, than screw it, she wasn’t either.

I tried to convince them that riding a bike isn’t so tough. I told them how I still knew how to do it, even though it was years ago since I rode regularly. I showed them pictures of a sea of Asians riding their bikes to work because it was too crowded and expensive for everyone to have a car. I tried the environmental angle, how no pollution was created because of a human powered bike ride. Everywhere we drove, I would point out idiots riding their bikes. “Look, kids,” I’d say. “That guy looks drunk, and he can still manage to balance and tootle down the median into oncoming traffic. If he can ride a bike, so can you!”

Fast forward to last month. S, at eight years old, decided it was time for her to learn to ride her bike. E, at ten years old, refused to accept her baby sister mastering this basic childhood skill before her. So it became a challenge, which meant that every night after dinner, we braved blood thirsty mosquitoes and 98% humidity to help them overcome their fears.

S was highly motivated, and she also has the ability to make changes when she wants to, a skill most adults never master. She wanted to learn how to ride her bike, so she got on it and rode. Sure, she still had training wheels. Yes, she fell over a couple of times, even with said training wheels. But she got back up and tried again. It was a beautiful thing to watch. By the end of the second night, she could pedal mighty speedy up and down the street, with barely a plastic rattle of training wheel to be heard. Her upper lip was beady with sweat. Her face was blood red from the heat and the exertion. Her hair was matted and wet under her helmet. Most of all, she glowed with pride.

E, on the other hand, made room for panic on the bike. She has outgrown her blue Schwinn Dee-Lite, since it was purchased for an anxious six year old who wouldn't sit on it. Now she is almost my height, and her knees would hit her chin if she could muster the bravado to actually ride it. Her training wheels popped off on their own the first night she walked it up and down the street in front of our house, just testing the waters, getting the feel of it. She progressed to very stiff balancing and rejecting help while yelling at us for pressuring her the second night. The third night, she threw the bike on the ground and ran when another one of her fears joined us, the bee cleverly disguised as a hornet. (All bees are known as hornets around here, as if relabeling them justifies that level of terror.) The fourth night, she moved on to slow pedaling while either my husband or I held onto the back of her seat. In the meantime, S was riding literally in circles around her.

Drastic times, being what they are, meant I had to call in some reinforcements. My friend JR took a crack at it, and we saw E pedal independently about five times before she realized she was solo and stopped. MJ, a very experienced road biker, gave it a whirl. She came over with her combination of tough love and gentle coddling. “You can do it, you just have to believe,” she would say. When E would answer her, MJ shouted,” Less talking and more pedaling!”

While my husband and I pretended to be busy with our Frisbee, MJ convinced her to fly from the nest. E was riding! Not far, not fast, and definitely not stable, but it still counted. No training wheels were in sight, no adult hands clenched the seat back, and no more yelling could be heard.

The next day, E’s friend CM came over to play, and E very much wanted to show off her new skills. They went outside and tried some more, and with CM’s gentle guidance and encouragement, E started to ride all by herself. She could push off and pedal and get enough speed to make it farther than a yardstick. I was so happy that CM was here to make E feel comfortable, since she didn’t want to listen to the rest of us. The truth is, she is more comfortable with the rest of us, but with CM she had to be brave. Whatever. It worked.

We got E to ride from one mailbox to the next, then to another. Finally, being the idiot I am, I decided we all needed to ride from stop sign to stop sign. I didn’t take into account E’s lack of comfort and her inability to steer nor the subtle downhill curve in the road. We made it to one stop sign, turned around, and while I was guiding S back to our house, E bit it. I didn’t see it happen. All I saw was E lying on her back on the street, her bike on top of her like crumpled up sheets. She was crying softly, and both of her shoes had popped off. As I helped her up, I noticed the stream of blood flowing from her elbow. CM’s eyes had never looked bigger. I escorted E back to the house, leaving S to flounder on her own. After cleaning up the blood, which made E almost faint on top of CM, and assessing all other injuries, E was done biking for a while.

S, on the other hand, really was ready to roll. After a couple of days’ hiatus, during which E convinced herself she had cracked a rib even though she was fully capable of swimming and attempting to play tennis, S persuaded us to go back outside with the bikes and continue what she started. My husband took her training wheels off, and after the practice she had, she got on and rode. She has confidence and speed and a little style. She’s not ready for trail riding yet, but with a bit more practice, she isn’t far from it. E, however, not so much. She is back to riding by the yardstick, after talking too much, over-thinking, and losing her temper with anyone close by.

They say you never forget how to ride a bike. What I hope is that, like me, E forgets how she learned to ride a bike.

Believe It or Don't

I wanted to start writing “When I was a kid” but I decided that makes me sound at worst like Andy Rooney, at best like Garrison Keillor. Talking about how things were different when you were young only serves to remind your audience that you are not young, that your frame of reference was from so long ago that you understand shaking it like a Polaroid picture or having your cassette tape eaten by the player or to change the channel on the television, you had to get up and walk across the room and manually turn a knob to see the three or four choices of programming available. But in order to compare my children’s experience to my own, I have to do the “when I was a kid” thing, even if I am only talking about seeing my first shrunken head.

When I was a kid, my mom took me and my sisters to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in St. Augustine. I don’t remember how old I was, but I have a feeling I was still in the bed wetting years, and everything about that museum freaked me out. It was one of those ornate historic buildings, not that far from Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth (which sounds like a great name for a frozen mixed drink bar, kind of like a new Fat Tuesday’s) and the Old Jail. I only remember small details about the museum itself. I remember a log cabin made out of matchsticks. I remember something unusual made with pennies, but only that they were very shiny. I remember a picture of an Asian man with two irises in each eye. I am pretty sure there was an iron maiden somewhere in the building. But most of all, I remember seeing a shrunken head. A real head, only the size of an apple. It was black and leathery and boneless, but the hair was still long and dark. I was terrified of the shrunken head. For weeks after our visit to that shrine to all things weird, I could be reduced to tears merely by someone uttering the words “shrunken head” near me. Come bedtime, I was trapped in my bed, too scared to get up and use the potty, lest the shrunken head was somewhere in my room, waiting for me. No wonder I was such a chronic bed wetter. I don’t think it took weeks to get over that. It took months. No, years. Definitely years.

On our most recent trip to Myrtle Beach, one of my girls noticed a billboard advertising the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, which like all things once considered unique and one of a kind is now franchised regionally to optimize the all mighty tourist dollar. It was a billboard of the same Asian man, whom my sisters and I used to call Four Eyes. My husband didn’t really want to go because he was convinced it was only going to be pictures of oddities and gross stuff. But my girls and I convinced him that it was a must-see tourist destination, that they were old enough to handle it without a year of nightmares, and that it was not going to be a total waste of money.

While we waited outside for tickets, we watched a display featuring second rate animatronic figures playing instruments and singing-- a tiny man in a cage, a Thai woman with a big stack of neck rings, and the world’s tallest man appeared to belt out Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” “This is gonna be good,” I said to my husband while he shelled out more money than the experience was worth.

We hustled the girls through the gates. The first thing we spied walking in was a deer with its underdeveloped twin’s legs hanging down like a cow’s udder from its belly. “See?” I said to him. “That’s no picture!” We also saw a duck wearing prosthetic tennis shoes since he was hatched without webbed feet. We walked upstairs to a room that gave a little historical feeling to the whole museum. Ripley, after all, scoured the world for his collection of oddities that he shared with his audiences. It’s not like these people could learn about conjoined twins by searching the Internet. If there wasn’t a two headed calf on the next farm or the world’s fattest man at the local carnival, how would people even know of their existence? So, to some degree, my husband was right, because the museum did have pictures of things, but he seemed to enjoy the historical context and didn’t complain.

The next room was more human oddities and feats, including a cast of a unicorn man, a framed mat of hair cut from a woman who grew her ponytail until it was over six feet long, and a film of some dude in a suit who could lift a cinder block with his lower eye lids. My daughter E was feeling a little queasy about that time, so we went into a more dark and primitive area. There we saw weapons made of human bones, masks made of human skin, skull candle holders, and other disgusting artifacts of a simpler time, way simpler, when to deal with those who didn’t agree with you was a matter, literally, of kill or be killed, and possibly eaten. With the dim lighting and pounding tribal drums, I almost expected some high priest to come from behind a display and rip my still beating heart out of my chest. I always did like the Indiana Jones movies, so I was pretty happy.

And then we saw it, the Shrunken Head. It was as disgusting as I remembered, but not nearly as horrifying. Now, I could look closer at the empty eye sockets and sewn up lips and think, eww, gross but cool. My daughters, who never had the bed wetting years, just wanted to keep moving. They loudly questioned our judgment for choosing to take them to Ripley’s. Nobody wants to have their parenting skills criticized loudly in a museum in Myrtle Beach. I reminded them it was their idea, and no, we are not leaving, so look at that shrunken head, dammit!

The creepy part of the museum culminated in the gothic room, where, yes, the iron maiden was housed. There were some iron shackles, an assortment of shivs and shanks confiscated from prisons, and other torture devices dangling from the walls, and it was about this time my kids thought we had left the museum and entered the Ripley’s Haunted House, conveniently located next door. I assured them we were still in the museum, and luckily, the next room was a little more brightly lit and a lot less macabre. In it were a roller coaster made out of matchsticks, butterfly wing art, and a bunch of other boring stuff that was not made out of dead people. After walking through a moving tunnel designed to trick the eye and cause motion sickness, we were dumped unceremoniously into a video arcade. The museum was over.

I told the girls about when I was a kid. We would watch “In Search Of…” with Leonard Nimoy and “That’s Incredible” and the ultimate, “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” with Jack Palance’s labored narration. I told them how that was when reality TV shows were good, not like today, with all the binge drinking and hook ups and ultraconservative Christians birthing giant litters of children. My husband explained to them that freak shows, which used to be commonplace at fairs and carnivals, have died off since people became more sensitive to people’s disabilities and differences. I told them we don’t even call them freaks anymore, because it can be offensive to freaks. The truth is, my kids can see a freak every now and then at Wal-Mart or You Tube. They aren’t a special treat anymore to be enjoyed with some cotton candy or popcorn.

We all agreed that the Ripley’s museum was worth the visit, but I could not convince them to go to the Haunted House. They had enough scary for one afternoon. But no one was as traumatized as I, which was great, because I didn’t have to change anyone’s wet sheets in the middle of the night.