Sprung

"Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet.
And all things are made young with young desires."
Francis Thompson (1859-1907), British poet.

"Where in the hell are those hay-fever pills?"
Richard (1946- ), my barber.

Spring--the cliches are enough to make even the hardest of hearts surge with pleasant feelings of warmth and renewal: bunny rabbits, ball games, flower blossoms, starry-eyed young lovers, and, of course, the realization that five months sitting indoors on a steady diet of Doritos (corporate sponsors please note) and Ben & Jerry's (my e-mail is below) seems to have shrunk our trousers several sizes.

To paraphrase Tennyson, in spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of what he will look like in bathing trunks, and I can assure you that it is not always a pretty sight. Not that it ever stopped your average gold-chain-wearing car salesman with a paunch the size of a small Toyota from strutting along the beach in bikini briefs which he can't even see--no, far from it. As a matter of fact, it is part of the sartorial code of automobile salesmen, also known as the Big Fat Gut Inverse Proportion Rule, that the larger the beer belly gets, so shrinks the bathing suit.

Rolling thunder
Still, there are those of us with some semblance of pride, and our intent is to get into shape before Memorial Day. We were once adolescents ourselves, and have spent many idle hours at the beach looking too sleek and sinewy for our own good, swearing we would never sells cars for a living and calling our oleaginousness-challenged beach-mates "Rolling Thunder," "Jello Jowls," and other less kind names. We remember those times, and swear on a stack of Rogaine that we will never get so far out of shape that we will be forced, by law, to buy gold chains and bikini bathing trunks.

And we intend to do this without breaking a sweat.

So how, you are rightly asking, can one hope to drop 30 pounds by Memorial Day without exercise--or severe liposuction?

Lipo
Good question. First, let me say one important thing. Men do not undergo liposuction. It simply is not done. As I understand it, the act involves sucking the living cells from the fatty tissues of one's body. These fatty areas are often located at the waist, hips, and thighs, and it just so happens that they are also located very close to another extremely important region of a man's body. If there is any chance whatsoever that this region will be reduced in any way, even by accident, you will never find a man willing to go under the vacuum. There are enough burdens in life without having to explain that one in the locker room. Of course, if the procedure could be reversed, we're talking lines around the block.

Secondly, let me say something else. Men are vain. We will do almost anything to again look like we did in high school, without a) admitting it, and b) the pimples.

Almost anything except exercise.

Men sweat, of course, but only when they're doing things like work, or playing a game. Exercise means something like aerobics, and Richard Simmons has pretty much killed that idea for all time.

Plane aerobics
Except for a new type of aerobics that I discovered recently. It is called, please catch the play on words here, "Plane Aerobics."

I saw this, as you might have guessed, on an airplane. It was Northwest Airlines, whose bonafide corporate motto at the time was "Some People Just Know How to Fly." Presumably, of course, those "Some People" are the very people behind the wheel of our airplane.

Anyway, just after the meal (my wife and I had pre-ordered the vegetarian special because we do not trust airline mystery meat, which was served by a hostess who said, and I am not kidding, "You are going to be sorry you ordered this") they started a video called "Plane Aerobics."

The video featured a woman decked out in the standard aerobic gear, including a sweatband on her forehead which would no doubt catch the one micro-molecule of sweat produced by these aerobics exercises. Let me remind you that every one of these is done in a standard sitting-down position, airline style:

1. Tap your left foot five times. Tap your right. Tap them together.
2. Role your left foot at the ankle. Roll your right. Roll them together.
3. Lift your left leg several inches. Lift your right. Lift them together.
4. Inhale.
5. Exhale.

It goes on, but I think you get the picture. It's enough to say that we were all invigorated by the workout, and were later better able to handle the stress of the customs inspector discovering the crate of oranges we seemed to have accidently packed in our luggage.

And, so pumped, when I was offered the duty-free on-board shopping list, I was able to pass up the gold chains with a hint of smuggishness.

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