ZUMBA!

A week after we moved here, I took the girls over to the YMCA to sign up for a membership. It's actually affordable around here ($55 a month for the whole family), and there are all kinds of classes and sports for kids and adults that come free with the membership. I love this because I can take the girls swimming during the day, or I can drop them off for 1.5 hours while I take a class, or I can leave them home and go by myself. This last option is the one I chose yesterday in order for me and a new friend to try out the "hottest new thing in exercise": ZUMBA! Basically, it's aerobics with salsa dancing mixed in.

So my friend and I show up at the YMCA, find the class, and take two spots in the back. The woman teaching the class is slim, with long brown hair pulled into a perfect ponytail, and wearing one of those cute exercise outfits that she, of course, looks fabulous in. I am wearing black pants, a grey T-shirt, my walking shoes, and about 50 pounds of excess baby weight in the shape of a spare tire around my hips. My hair has enough bobby pins in it to conduct electricity, but it has to be this way because it's too short to be in pulled back, and too long to leave down.

The music starts. It's a Gloria Estefan/techno remix and seems like it's going about 180 beats per minute. I made it through the first few songs...took some deep breaths to ease the pain in my side, and stuck with it the best I could. It's fun, but the trouble I'm having is that my body is unable to grapevine with the feet while shimmying with the shoulders and grooving the jazz hands in an alternating single-single-double pattern. It's too much for this fat mama who, some days, can't find two brain cells to rub together.

But no worries! There's MUCH more to ZUMBA than shoulder shimmying! There was an entire song dedicated to gyrating our rear ends (with accompanying hand movements, of course), and I want to share with you how awesome the teacher looked. If shaking your derriere could win you...I don't know...something, she would definitely get "Best in Show". But a glance at my own efforts was not so glamourous--I looked more like I was trying to apply turtle wax to a school bus with my butt cheeks.

At one point, the instructor had us "riding the pony", and not a full 8 beats later, we were spanking it. There are very few things funnier to me than the mirror reflection of 30 women between the ages of 25 and 60 while they spank their individual ponies. Through my laughter, I noticed something stylistically about the spanking: there are those that do a little hand-flip on the backswing, the ones who spank in double-time, and the rest of us who are half-heartedly spanking our ponies because we are thinking, "If my husband and children could see me, I'd never live this down." I have to say that until yesterday, I have never "spanked the pony" in my entire life, and I'm actually embarrased to report that I have done so. So if I decide to ever ZUMBA again, I am definitely NOT spanking my pony. It's just...wrong...on so many levels.

If I have learned one thing from this, it's that I now know why there are very few fat Latino people...all that shaking, shimmying, gyrating, and yes, spanking works off quite a few tamales.

Gina