Archive for October, 2006

Sunday is God’s day. If you’re a Christian of course. I’m Jewish, which means it should be Friday night thru Saturday, and if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, there are no holidays because every day is God’s day, but that’s not the point. Sunday is supposed to be a day off. And if you work freelance, like I do, actually having Sunday off is a special blessing, so I decided I was going to make this one count.

I was going to bike across a bridge I’d never biked before, and go to a museum I’d never been to. I met up with my friend Marin, who has become my defacto Sunday biking buddy, as well as my closest friend in contrast to our height differences (6′ 5″ to 5′ 2″! Whoa.) and after tea at her house in Greenpoint, we decided it was time to saunter across the North Pole of Brooklyn to the strange, alien land of Queens via the Pulaski Bridge. That was easy pickins. Then came the Queensboro.

The Queensboro bridge is a long freakin’ bridge, and if you want to bike across, you have to enter from QB Plaza NORTH at about 27th ave. Plus side is, it’s much less steep than the Williamsburg.

Anyway, once on the Manhattan side, it was a harrowing trek through traffic to get ourselves to 38th and Madison where in classy, high-brow New York fashion, locked our bikes up to a sign-post and finagled a free admission (I love having an NYC Sightseeing License) into the

J.P. MORGAN LIBRARY.

For those unaware, J.P. Morgan was the richest man in the world for much of the late 19th century, through the early 20th. Inflation adjusted, richer than Bill Gates. Hyberbole adjusted, richer than GOD. In 1873 he saved the United States from bankruptcy with one really, really big loan. He was also a fatty with a big, honkin’ swollen red nose. Kind of like an evil capitalist Santa Claus with a big moustache and no beard.

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Everyone does freakin’ yoga. It’s more than just an NYC fad too, so considering how I want to be nice and healthy well into the age where I should just die and stop sucking up Social Security, I thought yoga would be a good hobby to dabble in. It’s supposed to help with balance, harmony, muscle-tone, and dating-life. I’m also a tall, clumsy oaf that still suffers from some balance problems relating to a 4-inch metal plate in my right foot (old performance-art injury) I decided to track down a good yoga studio.

Bikram offers yoga in rooms of over 100 degree temperature, so for those who enjoy an hour in the sauna, try augmenting that with holding complex and strenuous poses for 60 to 90 seconds at a time. Pass.

Vinyasa offers more basic routine stretches at a pace most of us only semi-athletic types can handle. Then I made the mistake of going into a 90 minute class in Williamsburg thinking it was only 60. After an exasperated 75, I gave up and sheepishly rolled up my mat and walked out with my downward dog-tail between my legs while all the other yogis were giving me upside-down looks of shame from their headstand positions.

Damn it! This is New York, and while we’d all like to think that we can turn ourselves into gorgeous, harmonious beings of light and balance, this is, as I said, New York freaking City. Home of compounded neuroses and 1 1/2 pound corned beef sandwiches, and in the span of my 10-item to-do list day, if you think I’m going to join a yoga studio at a discount monthly rate to financially guilt myself into perpetually carrying around a 24 inch wide mat and a spare set of clothes that stink of me-sweat for the rest of the day to keep up a four times a week yoga-habit, I got better things to do with my time that that involve salted snacks and a couch.

Where’s the studio-class version of Yoga for Dummies? Where I don’t need to pay $15 per session to desperately keep up with all the beautiful people, where I don’t need a strictly regimented fancy yoga outfit, where I can move from downward to upward dog to warrior pose to prayer twist in my own goofy, clumsy, stumbling, bumbling way? What we need is YOGA TO THE PEOPLE!

Oh, wait. Fortunately there’s “Yoga to the People“.

Right on St. Marks Place btwn 2nd and 3rd ave.

A friendly cast of yoga instructors invite practitioners of all skill level, from “doofus” to “better than you, but won’t brag about it” for a 60 minute long class of basic stretch routines that I’ve been gradually training myself to do without an instructor bearing down on me to hold that bicycle crunch for just a few more seconds. They ask very casually for a $10 suggested donation, into an empty kleenex box at the door of which I always give at least $5, and sometimes a generous $15.

A pair of shorts in my bag, a towel to wipe my buckets of sweat and a $10 mat I leave at the studio are all I need to keep up a once a week habit without any silly studio-member fees. 4-5 classes a day during the week and 2-3 on Sat & Sun make it easy to pass through betwixt my freelance work schedule or a day jam packed with errands. That is presuming I don’t ruin my focus on making the class by pigging-out on falafel or enjoying a happy hour brew or three right before class, but hey, priorities, priorities.