Kiss and Tell

On Saturday mornings, whenever we are free of commitments and the car’s tires are not frozen to the driveway, my wife and I find going to garage sales enjoyable entertainment. We rarely find anything of significance to purchase, but it is more the journey than the acquisition. This is just a time to decompress and nose around in other people’s private belongings and medicine cabinets EXCEPT while they’re watching.

Recently on one such expedition, my wife became thrilled to find a videotape for sale titled “08 min. LEGS”. As you can guess this is an intense but short exercise tape to focus on toning your legs. Given the leg warmers and fashion-forward choices of the fitness guru, the tapes were produced decades ago. But the exercise is truly only secondary – the real purpose of the purchase is to ‘complete our SET’.

“What?” How many legs do you have anyway – isn’t one tape enough? No, actually on previous garage sale outings over the last two or three years, my wife found and purchased BOTH “08 minute ABS” and “08 minute BUNS”. Now neither of us know how many other body parts are available for conditioning on these tapes, but at least for now our set consists of three.

I appreciate exercise but I particularly like it when OTHER people are doing it. Honestly, I know eight minutes is not much to ask to tone up so I have no REAL excuse. But part of me wants to blame the fitness industry since they are always trying to strengthen the same old hunks of meat. I mean where is the creativity and leading edge workouts for the rest of us who need attention in other areas of our bodies?

Consider the lips for one thing. I mean we speak with these things and kiss stuff every day of the week (Depending on how much you are brow-beaten by your boss). You would think those pink sphincters might be one of the first things body image experts would focus on for ‘perfection’? On second thought, nobody practices pursing more than smokers, and after years of ‘reps’ they start to get those little ‘pucker-puss’ lines that radiate out from the mouth. SEE, that’s the problem with exercise, you just shouldn’t over-do it. Nobody wants to wake up after years of working your abdominals to see a giant vortex of pucker-lines emanating from your belly button?

You know what it REALLY is, despite their reputation, fitness fanatics are just too lazy to create a lip workout routine that focuses on toning a dozen major muscles in your face. Just like those hunky personal trainers that apparently lack sebaceous glands, lip muscles all have fancy Latin names and NEVER SWEAT! I think I see a Hollywood opportunity here – ‘Angelina’s 08 minute Lips’! Better still, in a few years, yet ANOTHER garage sale workout video will be available to add to my wife’s set!