8:30 AM.
It’s a Saturday morning.
I’m awake.
And goddamn it, I’m going to go to yoga.
Surprisingly, finding free yoga in Santa Monica isn’t an easy task.
Of course there’s “donation-based” yoga places, meaning I slip in the back, bend around a little, and slip out like a movie theatre fart.
Unfortunately, for some reason, yoga only happens on Saturdays at 8AM and 10AM, just like Bikram himself wanted [citation needed].
Which means my glorious plans for 9AM full-body-stretching have been scuttled.
So I scour Yelp, eventually finding one 9:30 class at YogaWorks in Pacific Palisades.
Best of all, if I sign in as a noob (that’s “newbie” to you older folk) I get a week for free.
I gun it up Sunset to the Palisades, putting Gene Hackman in The French Connection to shame.
I took a brief moment to muse on the irony of rushing someplace to relax, but then realized I had a mom-SUV to overtake and got back to handling the twisties.
I parked somewhere a few counties away, and ran up to the studio, bursting through the doors and throwing off my jacket and shoes like a late hooker.
Swaggering into the small class (hosted in what appeared to be an end table drawer) I noticed something strange: I was the youngest one there.
Now I’m used to being the younger one in the group; after all, I’m the youngest cousin in the family and enjoyed hanging around adults as a kid.
However, when I’m in a group of people whose first presidential ballot was cast for a certain bespectacled polio victim, I take notice.
We laughed and joked around, and I grew attached to the grandmother next to me who, for some reason, felt the need to wear costume jewelry even in yoga class.
The positions that some of those women, just as mild-mannered as your grandmother got into, would put Sasha Grey to shame.
The instructor couldn’t help but comment on my “young, broad shoulders” as he readjusted my headstand stance, which for once gave me a brief feeling of a Sandusky victim.
Needless to say, it was the most boner-free and conversational yoga experience I’ve had.
If you want to do yoga and have fun (avoiding the intense Lululemonheads and professional trapeze artists that populate most studios) I recommend going during senior hour.
It’s worth seeing a roomful of saggy asses.
