They may have been smiling then, but we know the truth.
Whenever I stumble across an exercise video on Youtube, which, admittedly, is not that often, I wonder what the people who were in it are thinking. And it amuses me.
It’s easy enough if you really take the time to watch it. If I think back hard enough, for example, I can still remember the old Jack LaLanne show where he would do his workouts along with his white dog, Peppy. Jack would be exercising his brain out while his dog would either work along with us or sit there and watch. No matter what the dog did I always got the impression that it was thinking to itself “What the hell is this guy doing and when will I get my Milkbone? I’m sitting here not barking even though my owner is busy doing lord knows what and hawking protein shakes. I should at least get something for this.”
And so it was that I would watch Jack LaLane each morning because my mom wouldn’t change the channel after Captain Kangaroo ended until, finally, one day Jack was gone and a show called Sesame Street appeared in his place. It didn’t have enough of a beat to exercise to, but it was more entertaining.
Making the transition from what dogs are thinking to what’s going on in a person’s head isn’t always that interesting, though.
Take “Jane Fonda’s Light Aerobic and Stress Reduction” video from 1989 (conveniently just removed from Youtube), which is pretty blurry, but when it does a closeup on the woman in the pink leotard in the second row, for example, she has a smile on her face that only looks surface deep as if she’s thinking to herself, “Man, when this is over, I’m going to call my agent and give him a piece of my mind. I said, ‘Stunt woman, not. . . woman doing exercise stunts’…oh, never mind.”
And then there’s the guy in the back row stage right. You can’t miss him. He’s the only guy in the entire video and he’s obviously thinking, “I am loving this view. Too bad, I’m not in the middle of the back row though, if you know what I mean. They say, ‘Unless you’re the lead dog, the view never changes’ like it was a bad thing.” What do you want? It was the 80s and people thought things like that then.
The girl in the green is just desperately struggling to keep up while trying to remember what she needs to put on her grocery list. She knows what she plans to make for dinner, but keeps asking herself, “Does the recipe call for cilantro, or not? Dammit. Who even uses cilantro anyway? It just tastes like plastic.”
The blonde is worried that people might think her perfect 80’s coif is a wig that might fall off and what appears to be her effort to keep it on is well worth having to watch this silly video.
The girl with the long hair, meanwhile, is really appreciating the fanning effect her back is getting as she moves.
The African American woman is also smiling, but you can tell she’s having issues with the dancer next to her. I can almost hear her saying, “It’s called personal space, honey. Look it up.”
And Jane Fonda, well, she’s pretty happy, too, as she thinks to herself, “Who knew I could make more money pretending to care about the health of stay at home moms (and dads) than I ever did as an actress. I wonder if there’s some way I could do a video called ‘Exercising To The Beat With The Beat (Generation)? Who knows? I could already be doing that somewhere else on Youtube.”
