Staying in Rhythmic Step With the Sweat-Pants Set
Get the scene. I am in a suburban storefront filled with women in leotards and one man in a sweat suit. It is 1986, and I am in aerobics class for three reasons. One, it is a fad and it hasn’t peaked yet. Two, a bad foot forced me to stop jogging and I’m turning old, fat and ugly overnight. Three, I want to look like Sharon Taylor, my aerobics teacher.
She looks great as she sidles along to the one-and-a, two-and-a beat in her red-and-white, candy-striped leotard and matching headband. I look like an idiot. Suddenly, I actually hear the words to the song we are working out to. The voices sing: “Free . . . Nelson Mandel-a!”
Two minutes later, I leave the kick line. I break out of the prison of aerobics. It’s just not my cup of sweat.
Three years later, Sharon Taylor looks better than ever--thick, dark, waist-length hair, bright, sparkly hazel eyes, high cheekbones and not a bit of makeup. We are discussing her life in aerobics, and it is clear to me that she is talking about her passion, not her job.
Sharon is practically a professor of aerobics without portfolio. She has been studying aerobics for seven years, reading “the research,” taking monthly workshops from IDEA--the International Dance and Exercise Assn. She teaches three classes a week. “At my age that’s enough,” the 36-year-old instructor with the well-toned body says. But, “to keep up,” she also takes one class a week from another instructor.
“The lay public’s notion of aerobics is Jane Fonda, Cathy Smith and Victoria Principal,” Taylor says with some scorn. “They’re actresses who’ve decided to make a buck off aerobics, and they don’t know jack about it.”
Taylor sees the aerobics subculture as having two strata: the gymnasium aerobics of ordinary people and the studio set who follow the actresses. She says the studios attract what she calls “the high-powered aerobophiles; you know, tight bicycle pants, crop tops that show your stomach, lots of products in the hair--mousses, gel--that’s all part of the studio look.”
Well, Jane, I observe, is no moussehead.
“No,” Sharon Taylor says, “but she has a do.”
How does the lady with the “do” do it, I wonder. How does Jane always look so good?
“She edits. She edits the tape. No one can look that good and talk that sweetly and nicely for an hour.”
The studios also have a high-powered look, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a whole industry that produces music to feel-the-burn to. Taylor describes this music as “technopop, Casio plug-in with a driving rhythm. It sounds like sneakers in the dryer. I hate it.”
By teaching at the YMCA, Taylor caters to the gymnasium set. “These people are more social. They wear sweat pants and T-shirts. We don’t have mirrors, so people aren’t there to look at themselves.”
Although she may be into people’s aerobics, Taylor herself has a whole wardrobe of adorable aerobics outfits. “Clothes are part of the motivation to go to class. Since there’s no equipment in aerobics, the clothes are the equipment. They make you feel like you’ve advanced.”
For motivational reasons, Taylor favors popular music. “I go for top-40 radio station music. Then, you hear a song on the radio and it makes you think of your class. You like the class, you like the song, you want to exercise.”
Like Fonda, she sees herself as an entertainer, who is there to make exercise fun. Her students are typically “mothers, women age 17 to 70. Once in a while, a man will stray in and take the class and never come back. They want more Army calisthenics, jumping jacks--manly movements.”
So is aerobics sissy?
“Men have a whole different set of expectations about exercise,” Taylor says. “They want to hurt. They want to grunt and sweat. They don’t want to move their feet in little dancy ways.”
This doesn’t stop men from watching. Taylor’s class is preceded by a “Cardiac Rehab” class. “These are mostly overweight, bald men,” she says. “They stay a good 20 minutes after their class, watching mine from the rear.”
“Of the gymnasium?”
“Of the gymnasium.”
In explaining what makes her work out, Sharon Taylor recalls her career in aerobics--from that first class seven years ago (“I almost died”) to the moment a year later when her teacher called her forth and said, “I like the way you move.”
She sees teaching aerobics as a break from her “real job” as office manager for the California Society for the Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Drug Dependencies. “With teaching, I’m in charge. I like the feeling of designing the class and telling people what to do. People follow what I say, so I’m really conscientious about it.”
And when she is up there and the whole big group is sidling along with her, there is “an exhilarating feeling of motion.”
Aerobics gives one permission--you might say--to free the inner Nelson Mandela.
