Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

Two very kind readers encouraged me to continue posting. 

About what? I asked. Going to the supermarket?

Here's the thing about stretching. If you don't keep it up, you start to feel stiff pretty quickly. My back and my legs have been aching the last four or five days, in a way they didn't before or during my Pilates week. I'm going to check out one of the Pilates studio candidates today to see if I can get back on a Reformer before too much more time goes by.

My eating plan also took an unfortunate turn this weekend. I can't resist my own baking, is the problem, and I ended up making two birthday cakes. They were delicious. 

For the photo interval, I will illustrate an abbreviated history of my themed birthday cakes:

This year, the shape was "Birthday Cake."

Buttercream frosting is the best. There's a Weight Watchers slogan that goes something like "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels." This is not correct. 

But back to my theme. Since the physical aspects of stretching were so easily subverted, I extrapolate to the metaphoric––an alternate blog title?––and come to the conclusion that the two lovely readers had my best interests in mind when they encouraged me to keep posting. 

So, now vee may perhaps to begin.* 

*That's the last line of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. You see, Portnoy, the narrator, spends the entire book explaining to his psychiatrist his whole life story, his complicated psychological history, and all the reasons he is so screwed up,  and at the end of it all, that's what the psychiatrist says. I shouldn't be explaining things like that, should I?

Summing up

Alternate title: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not over Kansas any more. . . thank God!"

That was a rocky ride home. Don't think it was just ME, all you people who know how much I don't relish flying. It was ROUGH.  For 45 minutes, while the in-seat TVs tuned to MSNBC were telling us that tornadoes were touching down in Oklahoma, we were flying over Oklahoma. While The Weather Channel was reporting from Kansas that flying monkeys were filling the skies*, we were flying over Kansas. 

*Not true.

Once the flight attendants were allowed to get up again, the guy behind me asked for a Scotch.  I asked for ginger ale and animal crackers.

But that's not why I called you all here today.

The summing up.

Between massive loads of laundry, I contemplated the overall experience of the past week. I had additional incentive to do so because, as luck would have it, I had an appointment with my therapist today. And finally, in a trifecta of enlightenment, I received the final sermon from Mount Oprah.

When I told my therapist about the women's conference from last month and about the week I just had––that list of new experiences that I wrote about here the night before I left for L.A. (traveling, traveling alone, etc.)–– she said, "So you've been stre-e-e-tching (she pulled her hands apart to illustrate) yourself." 

Funny you should say that. Yes, I have.

I am satisfied that I did what I set out to do.  I feel I have stretched, with all its multiple meanings. I feel motivated to keep up the physical work (I'll be researching and visiting a couple of local Pilates options), and I feel motivated to keep up momentum in other, less categorizable, directions. 

Pick your favorite metaphor: I'm on the brink of a new horizon, opening a new door, at a crossroads, starting a new chapter. There's me, Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira, and Mary Hart. And Regis. We're all going to be starting something new. 

And, of course, Oprah. I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with Oprah. But today, I didn't want to argue. I just let all the inspirational advice wash over me––be responsible for your own life; listen to the whispers in your head telling you what you are meant to do; bring energy to everything you do and everyone you encounter; everyone is worthy of happiness. 

Her 25 years and my last chapter of 25 or so years roughly coincide. Yet––another Oprah maxim–– there are no coincidences. So it's a sign.  

I'm pretty sure she was telling me to start my own television network.  

I don't know what the use of this blog will be now. I may keep posting, because I like the outlet, but please––PLEASE–– feel free to stop reading it. There will be no more celebrity sightings. There will be no more photos of my meals. I don't know what there will be. If anything exciting happens, I'll alert you all individually.

OK, just for old time's sake, here's my breakfast today. 

But I had to make it myself. :(

Oh, the punchline:

Guess how much weight I lost after exercising several hours a day and eating sensible, portion-controlled meals for six days?

0.0 pounds

Thanks for reading, everybody! I really appreciated it!

Tired

Tired.

I have to pack before I go to sleep, and I am very close to being asleep. I guess the week finally caught up with me. I probably worked out more today than any day so far, so it's no surprise.


I started with 30 minutes on the treadmill, followed by breakfast out by the pool.

That's an omelet with cheese, and salsa. And an orange.

Then I took another trek out to Rodeo Drive, which ended up being about 90 minutes more of walking.

Our 12:00 noon appointment was a "hike" with Alessandra (I've been spelling it wrong) in Coldwater Canyon.
It was really beautiful and I'm just too tired to do it, or our outing, justice. Here is a photo of one of the vistas:

My eyes are closing, so I'm going to cut this short. In the afternoon, an hour of Gyrotonics with Andy, and an hour of Pilates with Alessandra. Hugs goodbye to them and to Mari.

It's time to pack, but in the bigger picture, it's time to reflect on what this experience meant to me. That's not going to happen tonight.

  

Here are lunch and dinner.

I have one more Sunfare meal for breakfast tomorrow. Then it's nothing but Terra Chips on the flight home.

See you back in the eastern time zone!

Sunday in The Grove with Ben

(Posted past midnight, Eastern time, so it gets dated Monday. But this is Sunday's entry.)

Our day off.
As such, not a lot to report on the stretching front. I did a half hour on the treadmill in the hotel and had breakfast after.  Eggs, fake sausage, and pancakes––nothing remarkable, but I took so few photos today, that I'm going to include the customary breakfast shot:

And for mid-morning:

As you can see, walnuts travel in larger herds than pecans. But what's with the mass quantities of sausagettes?

Anyway, the highlight of the morning was my facial at the hotel spa. Again, no photos. Sorry. My facialist was a very nice young woman named Jamilla. Since most of the time my eyes were covered, my impression of her came more from the auditory than the visual, and she talked exactly like Mindy Kaling, which amused me. There were various lotions and masks, the usual stuff, and a nice arm and shoulder massage, too. I was advised to exfoliate regularly! And I promised I would.
Since I am low on visuals today, I will show you the product she recommended for exfoliating. Not even expensive! Available in drugstores! Thanks, Jamilla!

After lunch, Ben and I went to The Grove, which is a Disneyland of shopping. It was crowded and lively, but I saw only a very small corner of it because we were there to go to the movies, to see Bridesmaids. (Plug: Go see Bridesmaids! Go more than once, like I did.) This is the first movie theater I've ever been to where you buy assigned-seat tickets. Leave it to L.A. to innovate when it comes to the movie-viewing experience.

High and low art at The Grove. And by high, I mean close to the ceiling.

We had a surprise invitation from Mari and her husband to come to dinner at their house tonight, so that's where we went after the movie. They live up in the Hollywood Hills, just off Mulholland Drive. Hummingbirds flitted around in the garden, and the conversation included a lot of name-dropping (which I love, of course), so I felt like I got a nice dose of Angelenos in their natural habitat.

And now, de rigeur, the celebrity countdown for today. Slim pickings, I'm afraid, but not a total loss.
I guess this is a good time to describe that the hotel has been hosting junkets the whole time I've been here. There is a daily schedule in the lobby. For instance:

That's probably too hard to read, but it announces that actors from these three movies––Beginners, Kung Fu Panda 2, and Super 8––will be somewhere in the hotel today, where they will sit in a room for hours on end, while local entertainment reporters from media markets all across the country parade through, each getting a short window of time to ask them the same questions, over and over. But you knew all that.

At various times today, I was in the elevator with Lucy Liu's manager on the way up to the 12th floor for the Kung Fu Panda 2 junket, a gaggle of hyper teenage boys who are in the cast of Super 8, and the only bona fide sighting of the day: Kyle Chandler. He looked handsome. You can google him. But then, if you have to google him, you might not think he counts.

Sorry to disappoint. I guess even celebrities need a day of rest.

"I'm looking for a gift for my Pilates instructor."

As I uttered this sentence today, I realized it probably ought to be an entry in the "How to Speak L.A." phrase book.

In consultation with Ben, I decided I want to give Allisandra a token of my appreciation for being such a sweetheart. I had two sessions with her today––the first was a "power walk" around the neighborhood of the studio, the second was another hour of Pilates. She is very encouraging, saying "Beautiful!" or "Niiiice!" in her charming Brazilian accent in reaction to almost everything I attempt. What I'm doing is far from beautiful, but she is so sincerely enthusiastic about it all that I almost buy it. I know I AM performing all the moves better every time I do them, and much better than the first time––which was only three days ago! 


There were two (minor) celebrities at the studio this morning: Dita Von Teese (yes, she was wearing the makeup, which is why I recognized her) and Elizabeth Berkley, who looked tall and sort of pretty, but sort of like a mannequin.


After the studio, Ben and I went to Canter's Deli for lunch, where we saw Andy, the Gyrotonics instructor, who is a waiter.  Don't worry, we more or less stuck to the diet plan there. More or less.

Sorry I didn't take photos of any of these important moments, but here's breakfast, which I always eat alone in my room, so there's no embarrassment about taking a picture:

That looks like a lot of food, doesn't it? The bacon is actually part of my "mid-morning snack." Also, the bacon is actually not bacon, of course. It is the equivalent of Turkey Roll-ups.  I can't tell you what kind of poultry laid those sausages, but it turns out it's all edible.
The other part of my mid-morning snack consisted of a kiwi and some pecans. Wait, you have to see them:

Pecan 1: "Should we go talk to those kiwis?" Pecan 2: "No."

In the afternoon, I walked to Beverly Hills proper, where I said "Je cherche un cadeau pour mon instructrice de Pilates," but in English. That was on Beverly Drive, a block and several levels of reality from Rodeo Drive. The whole shopping area was pretty crowded––a mix of tourists, foreigners, and oodles of various L.A. types, dressed and groomed as if they might be "somebody." But everybody looks like that, so the distinction between the ones who are somebodies and the ones who are poseurs is almost irrelevant. I am, luckily, invisible, so I can pass among them all unnoticed.

Oohh––don't tell the food police, but I stopped for a frozen yogurt at a place called Menchies, which is like Pinkberry or Berryline, but it's all self-serve, so you can choose among about a dozen flavors of yogurt and then about a zillion toppings. Delish.

And then dinner at Cut, with Mari and her husband. The restaurant is in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which is pretty posh/old Hollywood. (90% chance we saw Anna Kendrick walking  into the hotel, bedecked for some event.) The filet mignon was truly delicious. My outfit that I fretted over last week was fine.
Tyra Banks was in the next booth. She had fish.

Banner day

I had three workout sessions today; two Pilates hours––morning and afternoon, one with Mari, one with Alissandra–– and one hour of Gyrotonics.
Gyrotonics is. . . um . . . something like . . . um . . .I don't know what it is.*
It's done on apparatus that looks like this:

and like this:

My instructor was a man named Andy who was super-nice and funny and who used to be a singer and dancer in New York theater. He used all kinds of colorful imagery to try to get me to move my limbs and joints and muscles in very subtle and mysterious ways––things like painting the wall with my heels, and moving my torso like it was a block of wood, and something about a pipe cleaner that escapes me now. He was very, very nice and it all made sense at the time.

There was a lot of great stretching, and I'm sure my posture was much better during the hour.  It was interesting and fun, and now I've experienced Gyrotonics, though I'd be hard-pressed to explain any of it to anyone. (Hard-pressed is how I felt during a lot of it, too. Ha ha.)

*GYROTONIC^® methodology allows users to stretch and strengthen muscles, while simultaneously stimulating and strengthening connective tissues in and around the joints of the body. These exercises are synchronized with corresponding breathing patterns, thus enhancing aerobic and cardiovascular stimulation and promoting neuro-muscular rejuvenation.

I've definitely improved at some of the Pilates movements, even after just these three sessions. I can roll up consistently––the move I could just barely accomplish at home on my own––and I'm more flexible in many directions. I see a very clear benefit of having an instructor's one-on-one attention, and of using the equipment and not just doing the mat work. Mari says there's no reason I need to be sore as a result of doing Pilates, so that's good to know. Because I don't feel sore. I feel pretty good.

Ben and I spent a good deal of time in the car today, though, because we had to go back and forth to Santa Monica twice, in terrible traffic: Mari has just changed the location of her second studio, and she had a reception for the official opening tonight. We did our Pilates workouts with her there, then back to Beverly Hills to change, then back for the reception.




Now I'm going to throw some pictures at you, because I'm leading up to something for which I, SADLY, do not have a photograph:

Breakfast quesadilla

Mari's Santa Monica studio

The Cadillac in the Santa Monica studio

Random shot of L.A. from my hotel room balcony

And now––– ding ding ding––the jackpot:

As we waited for the elevator at the hotel before our drive to the reception, at around 5:30 pm, there at the other bank of elevators was Jon Hamm.

How did he look? Is that what you asked?
He looked very, very good.








 

A (very small, very hot) room of one's own

Yesterday:
Pilates, at last, with Mari Winsor. It was a great 45 minutes. I didn't let on that I'd tried some of the exercises at home, because it made all the difference in the world that she was there correcting my form all the time. She is very encouraging and friendly and pleasant. After some initial stretching, which was like great physical therapy, I did a bunch of exercises on The Reformer and The Cadillac, and it was hard work but very satisfying.

And it was just plain cool to do.
After lunch (a yummy and filling Tex-Mex wrap; forgot to take a picture), I went for a walk. In accordance with the cliche about Los Angeles, there was pretty much nobody else walking anywhere.

Evidence

I don’t understand why L.A. is like this—there are perfectly adequate sidewalks, the weather is great, and there are lovely flowering trees everywhere… what up, L.A.?

When I got to Robertson, where there are restaurants and shops, the pedestrian activity picked up a little bit. As I passed The Ivy, I saw all the outdoor diners staring across the street and holding up their iPhones to take pictures. I looked across the street, and this is what I saw:

These six fine gentlemen were in a frenzy, photographing Rachel Zoe (I had to ask, sorry to say I can’t identify Rachel Zoe at 100 feet), her nanny, and her baby. Eh.

My afternoon workout appointment got cancelled, so I used the equipment in the open-air fitness center at the hotel and then I thought I’d try out the spa.

Ladies' locker room

Nobody else was around, so I had the whole place to myself. I may use the actual spa services in the next few days, but today I just decided to spend a few minutes in the steam room, and then I switched to the sauna.

I lay on the bench there, and it was quiet and closed off from “the world,” and I found myself talking to my mother, telling her where I was and what I was doing. Because, wise readers, it’s no big revelation to any of us that the reason I had the urge to write a blog now, all of a sudden, is that I no longer have her as my infinitely receptive audience whenever I want to say, “Hey, look what I did!” So, I had a Moment there in the sauna. And that’s part of why I made this trip, too–– so good for me.

The food

Let me explain how I'm eating.
Ben (I'm getting used to calling him "Ben") wants to lose weight, so while he is under Mari's supervision, he is eating Sunfare food. For the experience, so am I. It is based on The Zone, as I understand it, so it is protein-philic and carb-phobic. The fresh, nutritious, portion-controlled meals are delivered to the hotel each morning and then (per Ben's requests) heated and delivered to us, room-service-style, on real china instead of in take-out boxes, or whatever it comes in.
We had yesterday's lunch by the pool, and I just had my breakfast in my room. Here it is:

Nice enough, right?
The main dish there is Sausage Egg & Spinach Scramble - Sweet chicken sausage sauteed with spinach and onions scrambled with farm fresh eggs finished with dice tomatoes.
And an orange. All tasty.

The other plate is supposed to be my mid-morning snack

and, after taking a little nibble, I declare those patty-looking things to be extremely questionable. And as of this writing, I have already eaten the pumpkin seeds--so much for "mid-morning."

For the record, I want to clarify that my emphasis on "fleeting" in the Roger Sterling post was straight-out bragging––intended to highlight my highly developed celebrity-sighting skills. My visual access to his lap-swimming and schmoozing activities were not at all fleeting.

I have my first session with Mari in a couple of hours. My choices now are to walk into "town" (I have no idea what this means) or sit by the pool with one eye on the New York Times and the other scouting talent.

I'll let you know.

Right out of the starting gate

In my first two hours in LA, having lunch by the pool at the hotel, I caught a fleeting glimpse––FLEETING, I tell you––of a silver-haired man, wearing a baseball cap, heading to a chaise lounge to drop off his backpack.  And I said to Ben, "Is that John Slattery?"

I know it's hard to see, but I had to be discreet. I pretended to be looking at something  on my iPod.

Would I be telling you this if it weren't?
 Roger Sterling himself, doing laps for fifteen minutes or so. And it was a Red Sox cap, by the way.

And this was lunch. Lovely and delicious.

My introduction to Winsor Pilates Studio was a class in something called Capoeira. Has anyone heard of this? It's Brazilian martial arts. You can Google it. (Sorry, I'm a little too sleepy to find a good link to a video for you. If you do look at one, don't get too excited. What we did were some very very basic moves, more like jazzercise than jiu jitsu.) The instructor was a lovely young woman named Allisandra with a huge smile and the flattest abs ever.
I have not yet met Mari.
Oh, oh––almost forgot: then we saw Elisabeth Moss having photos taken in the hotel garden.
I have an excellent source for tons of gossip––Sunil, the Director of (VIP) Guest Relations, whom Ben has befriended from the last time he stayed here. Discretion is apparently not a job requirement. He alerted us in advance about the photo op for "Lizzy" Moss, and has freely shared tales of plenty of other former guests. . .
But I'm sleepy now––it's been a long day. Tomorrow I will meet Mari and presumably do some Pilates.
When I wake up at some ungodly east coast hour, I'll write some more.

Jump right in

Hello People of Earth,

As (sort of) promised, here is my blog, created for the purpose of sharing photos and description of my LA Pilates adventure. All the previous entries were preparatory, to figure out how to post photos, etc. and to give me a running start. Today I found out how to include links! You can read back issues if you have nothing better to do--but you won't have missed anything if you start right here.

To summarize the circumstances:
I am heading to Los Angeles tomorrow for six days to do Pilates. And some other exercise, I think. With Mari Winsor.

Each of you expressed an interest in hearing about what transpires, and I thought this would be a more creative and satisfying (to me) way of letting you know, preferable to trying to give you the highlight reel in a dozen individual conversations or messages once I get back.

I'm not experienced at this kind of sharing. I am a very willing water-cooler anecdote-teller and an enthusiastic recounter of experiences, gossip, and/or personal revelations in email form, but this broad-spectrum sharing is alien to me. I'm in a discomfort zone, between cheerfully spilling the beans and guarding the beans and coyly calling them lentils to protect their identity. The way I'd tell one of you a story might sound phony and embarrassing to another of you. This causes me anxiety.

But this blog is about stretching. See the name of it? STRETCHING, get it? I like things that have multiple meanings. (It's not exactly a portmanteau word; that would be something like "Growtching" or "Strexperiences.") And part of the stretching I want to do is letting people see things I write, without apology.

And this wasn't QUITE an apology.

So now––let the fun begin! I'm packed, I've got my boarding pass printed, the taxi is coming at 6:45 a.m. tomorrow.
Here are some things I don't normally do that I'm going to be doing:
Traveling.
Traveling alone.
Flying.
Flying alone.
Going near the San Andreas Fault.
Staying in a Four Seasons Hotel. In Beverly Hills.
Exercising.
Talking to strangers.

Ready for takeoff

If you don't see any more posts it means that either I couldn't figure out how to use the wifi in the hotel, or I have become a Pilates casualty and my typing muscles are no longer functioning. 


Bye bye!

L.A. minus 2 days

Stop me before I go shopping again.

It's not that I'm buying so much, it's that I have spent so much time searching, searching, searching for the right items. And because of The Case of the Gala Shoes, I had to deal with a double dose of shopper's anxiety. Now the gala is history, and the shoes I wore ended up hurting anyway after a few hours, natch, but not as much as the others would have. Probably.

The new dilemma is that my host and benefactor (let's call him Ben E. Factor) informed me that we will be going to dinner with the Pilates guru and her husband on Saturday night. We will be going to Cut (which sounds like a club that SNL's Stefon would recommend: "LA's hottest night spot is Cut"). I googled it and found out it's a Wolfgang Puck joint. Must be kind of schmancy, right? I asked Ben what the dress code is and he said, "Nobody gets dressed up in LA. Everything is casual."

Well, I don't think Beverly Hills casual is the same as my casual. I see US Weekly--I'm no dummy. So I shopped in my closet and then spent multiple hours today at TWO MORE malls, not really knowing what I was looking for. An alternate identity, I guess. Something that would make me look like I fit in at Cut, and not like I was a middle-aged matron from the some east-coast suburb, with my Talbots sweater set, Rockport sandals, and Vera Bradley handbag.

But I couldn't find her/me in J. Crew (too young), Ann Taylor (too young), Banana Republic (too young), Bloomingdales (too expensive), Chicos (too Chicos), Anthropologie (too whimsical and, obviously, too young), or the aforemetioned Talbots (too me). I was going to give up and wear a mishmash of what I already own, God help me, when I turned left at Gap Kids and found myself in front of:

I had never shopped there, but I figured "Good enough for Michelle Obama, good enough for me." (You know I mean that she famously wore a WHBM dress on The View during the 2008 campaign, right?)

I tried on a lot of things, with the friendly help of "Nicole," and ended up buying two black sweaters and a pair of jeans. They all fit well, and they all still look like me, but with a slight continental shift toward the Pacific. I think I'll be OK. 

And anyway, Cut doesn't look THAT schmancy:

Relieved to report that my back is a lot better, thanks for asking, now that I've stopped trying to do Pilates. Bodes well, hunh?

Best-laid plans

Remember that "very minor muscle pain" in my right hip from May 3?

Yesterday it was a little more pronounced, and today it is a problem. Damn.

My goal the last two weeks was to get more flexible and more stretched out, so that my first day at the Pilates studio wouldn't do me in completely. But I gave myself an injury instead. I imagine I wasn't doing things correctly and if I had waited to be supervised while attempting these moves, I would have been corrected on the spot and this injury would have been prevented.

But, to quote the Secretary of State: "Woulda, coulda, shoulda." 

So, I'm taking Advil, icing the sore area, walking, and doing some of the modified exercises and stretches from the chapter in The Pilates Powerhouse called "Lower Back Pain and Weakness."  I guess I shoulda consulted the section on "Injuries and Injury Prevention" before I started.

In further updates, tonight is the gala, and I'm sorry to report that I will not be wearing those bronze shoes. The heels are very high, for the likes of me, and I wobble. Since the evening involves walking around a museum––on shiny, marble floors––all night, I'm going to minimize the risk of further injury. A small sacrifice on the fashion front, I guess, but I'm setting my priorities. I want to be able to walk onto a plane on Wednesday morning and lift my suitcase into the overhead compartment on my own power.

In the next few days I have to make the decision about inviting a few more readers into this arena. I am conflicted. I am eager to share the experience with interested parties, but very self-conscious about it, too.

It's all part of stretching, I know. Still. The contemplation of it makes me uncomfortable.

Thoughts, reader?

A day well spent

The South Shore Plaza. Who knew?

I needed a Macy's, and I was going to be half-way to the SSP because of a morning hair appointment, so I decided to go. I haven't been there in years.

South Shore Plaza is the great melting pot of malls.

Macy's and Lord & Taylor.  Also Filene's Basement, H&M, Forever 21.
Coach and Claire's.
J. Crew and Hot Topic.
Legal Sea Food and Auntie Annie's Pretzels.
etc.

And then there's this:

 a Target and a Nordstrom in the same mall

Am I wrong? Is this not as remarkable as it seemed to me?

Also, they have free wi-fi throughout the whole mall! (This is important to me, with only a stupid-phone and an iPod Touch with which to be in touch with the wider world.)

So I spent five hours there.

I bought a few things, but all I'm sharing for this episode is this pair of Calvin Klein sandals from Macy's:

They're low-ish wedges and (I hope) comfortable enough for everyday wear, and will be my go-to shoe in LA, when I'm not wearing sneakers. Can work with jeans or a skirt, no? (Those are just little metal studs dotting the straps. What? They're fine.)

Meanwhile, I did not do my mat work. I think five hours shopping is aerobic, but stretching did not get accomplished today.

Oh, and my host and benefactor for my Pilates adventure gave me a heads-up yesterday: By the end of this week, I am advised to give up all bread, potatoes, pasta, sugar, butter, and diet soda and to "stretch, stretch, and stretch some more."

When would you say the "end of this week" is? After the gala, right?

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

Henry David Thoreau said that. 

But, come on--he was a dude and lived, like, a million years ago. Right?

Of COURSE my enterprise requires new clothes. 

I've already bought:

 A tote bag/purse for optimal carry-on volume:

And a new hat for blocking harmful rays while lounging poolside. {Sorry, no picture.}

{OK, it's this.}

But what I really need are workout clothes--yoga pants and such. So I went to Marshall's this evening and bought two such pants and two workout tops. This, added to what I already have, should take me through six days of Pilates. I hope. 

The question remains, though, do I need any other new clothes? I'll be staying in a rather posh hotel, but it seems to me that my only activities will be working out at the Pilates studio, eating Sunfare microwaved meals in my room, and sleeping.  So, I'm kind of stumped about what else to pack. 

First things first, though: I have a fancy-dress gala to go to this Saturday (unfortunately in my pre-Pilates-miracle-transformation state, but what can you do).  I was informed--ahem--that I need "grown-up" shoes to go with my dress, so I bought a pair at Marshall's this evening. There's a better-than-even chance that I will be returning them, I'd say, but I'll try them out at home for a few days. They are sure to hurt--that's a given--and I will likely never wear them a second time, but do they fit the bill for this one-time need? Hmmm...

I know you're itching to see what they look like. 

Let me assure you that, color-wise, they are PERFECT. And pretty cheap (Franco Sarto). So, it's all a matter of how many bandaids I can hide under those straps, I think.

Now I feel bad about dissing Thoreau, up there. I like Thoreau a lot. 

But I don't think anybody needs to take fashion tips from him.

Rolling right along, but not like a ball

In today's Pilates session, I did all the beginner exercises again (though I have stopped doing "Rolling Like a Ball,"

because I don't think I have sufficient padding on my workout surface, and it kind of hurts), but I added a few of the Intermediate leg work exercises. They make me feel ballerina-ish.

This coming week, I plan to add in more of the Intermediate exercises, which should get me up to a decent starting point for what begins in earnest on May 18.

Today's accomplishment, worthy of recording, is that in the movement called "Rolling Up"

I was finally able to roll up! Without an assist from my elbow, I mean. So, for the record, that was accomplished on the fourth day of attempting it, in rep 7 of 8. And it seemed to have something to do with breathing at the right time and engaging my "powerhouse."

So that feels like progress.
As a reward, Tina Fey is hosting SNL for me tonight.

Bottle it

It's a good day.
I don't know what to credit, but I suspect it's some of this:

and a little of that:

and a lot of this:

I know enough to know that the endorphins produced by this happy confluence of circumstances and influences are not likely to last very long. Eventually some . . . what would they be––dorphins?. . .will flood in to take their place. But at least I'm entertaining the idea that I might be able to pinpoint a recipe or a formula that I can turn to again, with the hope of reproducing the beneficial result. 

For the record, I did the Pilates beginner mat work on M-W of this week; I took a long walk on T-Th, and I did both today, Friday.  I didn't have any muscle pain associated with new exercise, and while I first thought this mean I wasn't doing the movements correctly, I'm willing to think that Pilates is such a gentle form of exercise that pain is not a necessary by-product.

Yes, I'm anticipating looking back at this thought in two weeks and shaking my head at my pitiful naivete, while grimacing with acute pain in every part of my body.

LA, minus 15 days

I woke up expecting some congratulatory muscle pain, to prove how much I pushed myself in Day 1 of Pilates prep yesterday. But all I had was some very minor muscle ache in my right hip. Nothing at all in my abs--so I must not have been doing whatever I was doing correctly.

Rather than get back on the mat, though, I decided to do a long walk instead. (I absolutely promise to do mat work tomorrow.) I headed into town, then to buy a graduation card for my nephew (yes, lone reader, he is graduating on Saturday), and then to the post office at the "Heights" end of town, near the Starbucks. Approaching the post office, I saw a tall, very well-built man walking two beautiful dogs––a full-grown white lab and an adorable white lab puppy. I smiled at the dogs, smiled at the man, and he smiled at me. I thought, "That's somebody." A few double-takes later, I confirmed that it was my devoted fan:

It must have been quite a thrill for him to see me.

Cleaning up before the cleaners come

 

Today I begin two weeks of exercising to prepare for exercising. I will attempt "Pilates Mat Work for a Normal Healthy Body"--the Beginner exercises only. There are 15 of them, beginning with "The Hundred" and ending with "Total Butt Workout."

I have a lot of reflecting to do about "She Roars: Celebrating Women at Princeton." It was a wonderful event, and I'm not sure I can explain why, but every woman I talked to agreed. Here are a few images. I have video of Justice Sotomayor boogeying to "Staying Alive," but I think in the interest of national security I won't post it.

President Tilghman. The completely approachable Shirley. Again, inspiring.

A panel of amazingly formidable undergraduate women.

A panel of alumnae who make their living in the arts––two novelists, a TV writer, a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician. Repeat after me: Inspiring.

We were very well cared for. Here's one of our lunches under a tent at Whitman College. Festive, pretty, and delicious.

The weekend was certainly not meant as a celebration of nostalgia.
But I took a few photos just to re-capture the feeling of being on campus.

My freshman year entry in Pyne Hall. Historic.

My dorm suite for the next three years in Little Hall. The large bay window on the ground floor was our living room.

The best damn place of all. Who's gonna argue with that?

OK, looking forward:
Lie on your back.
Feel your whole spine meet the floor.
You should have the sensation that your spine is long and open. . . .