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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 26, 1987)
7T DENTON (AP) — And here I sit, I thought, bubbling and frothing in this tub like a turnip in a pot. Isn’t it amazing the torture people put themselves through in the name of self- improvement? Now, the hot tub was the best part of this particular masochistic undertaking. Before that came an hour of aerobics, led by a nubile nymphet named Raney. If you’ve ever been in a health club, you know the type. After two-and-a-half hours of continuous step-kick-step- ball-change, the pony, the swim, chasse and “now doubles!” her hair hasn’t moved, her makeup is undisturbed and she still has breath to sing along with the music and yell “whoo!” a lot. I, in the meantime, was doing the shin splints roll across the carpet and my friend Cheryl was into the stumble kick half-time to “Crocodile Rock.” Our hair had moved. In fact it had migrated down to stick to our teeth. Our makeup looked as though it had been applied during the cyclone scene in “The Wizard of Oz.” “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” I muttered, wiping eyeliner off my chin. I cursed under my breath, when I could find breath. Even before that, we’d spent an hour attached to various shiny machines we think will eventually make us look like Cher in our leotards. Karen, who owns the club and has vowed to make us mere shadows of our former selves, is hacked off because we’re not wasting away to nothingness. “No one doesn’t lose weight in my club,” she informed us and promptly tripled our torture time on the i ? shiny machines. Then she took us off everything that’s good to eat. Even Diet Coke. Is there life without sauces, red meat and The Real Thing? I doubt it, but I just signed a check for another healthy year, despite the fact I just signed healthy checks to enroll my husband in college and my dog in remedial obedience school. “No pain, no gain” is no truer than when you’re pushing to get that last lap out of an overexercised bank account. And this is only one example of the self torment I call self- improvement. “Whatever happened to painless dentistry?” I recall asking my gum specialist the other day as I lay in drugged semi consciousness in his reclinochair. “It’s an urban myth,” he replied, plunging both hands, plus some knives, needles, a small air hammer and what felt like the Hoover Dam into my mouth. This little venture into oral self-flagellation had something to do with a receding gumline. Far be it from me to have bald roots. So I allowed part of the roof of my mouth to be transplanted to the lower front and the entire left half of my mouth to be sheared and quilted. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” I groaned groggily as I staggered from his office with a cast in my mouth and a checkbook that looks like Cher in a leotard. People do lots of other really awful things to their bodies in order to make them better. Take the permanent wave. The last one I got was called a Uniperm. It involved having a young woman with spikes on one side of her head drizzle odoriferous liquids into my ears to fry. When the curlers came out, I looked at my poodled head in the mirror. “Toto,” I said to my reflection. “Which way to the wizard?” Donna Fielder is assistant managing editor for features at the Denton Record- Chronicle. Editor’s Note: This attentionl! page will be used each week as a forum for you, our readers. We encourage you to submit any original work that would be suitable for publication in At Ease. Pictures should be black-and-white shots that are unique either in content, angle or technique. Columns, essays or poems should be no longer than 500 words, and should relate to an unusual experience, a new perspective on a common experience, or just about anything else you want to share with our readers. Please don’t send us your gripes, complaints, or sermons on heavy-duty issues — send those to the Battalion’s Opinion Page. Don’t forget to put your name and phone number on anything you send us. Then just drop it off at the Battalion, Room 216 of the Reed McDonald Building. Be sure to specify that it is for M Ease.