variety, the spice of hooplife

My hooping playlist gets renewed every half year or so and is currently twelve hours of eclectic: Amadou&Mariam, Balkan Beat Box, Basement Jaxx, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, K’naan, MIA, Moloko, Thievery Corp, and assorted others (ok, Shaggy’s in there—I cop to it)… but I realized last week that I’ve been really limiting my freedom of expression with it.

Back in the day, at Allstars rehearsals, Christabel would talk about challenging ourselves to hoop to wildly different music to inspire different gestures and combinations. Once or twice, for the performance jam at the end of rehearsal, she’d pop in a CD that drove her point home. I remember Natasha getting some operatic number—I mean literally from an opera. She did well with it, incorporating her years of ballet training. The next song was, like, Frank Sinatra. And after that, maybe Tibetan chanting or something. When Christabel wasn’t there to enforce it, though, we stuck to our own favorites, on rotation.

I spent last week in heaven—living close to the land and in tight community on a gorgeous property known as Black Mountain in the Russian River area just an hour’s drive north of SF/Oakland. And among the many amazing folks up there, several talented musicians. One of them played classical guitar—think Andres Segovia—haunting Spanish riffs like my favorite heartrender Recuerdos de la Alhambra; some Bach, Schubert, very old traditional pieces like Greensleeves; things that sounded familiar but that I could never name… and I was invited (challenged… called….) to hoop to them.

So I hooped to Bach and I hooped to Greensleeves and to Andalusian melodies. And I think I had some real Moments out there… Some supercharmed Flow. It felt like I did, at least. (For better or for worse, none of it was captured, except in the minds’ eyes of folks who happened to be watching or passing by…) In fact, my hooping felt like it had a life of its own, almost separate from me, and I was just the conduit. It was phenomenal.

Just one more reminder that nature thrives with diversity, and is stifled by homogeneity…

The Rumpus Interview

From TheRumpus.net, an interview by Julie Greicius

Rumpus: Right! The book. Let’s talk about this book. You and this mortal HoopGirl have written a guidebook to sex.

Conrad: Actually, it’s a guide to hooping, the modern form of hula hooping.

Rumpus: Oh come now. Let’s take a look… “activate the muscles in your legs to power your pelvic thrusts,” it says here.

Conrad: Right, in order to keep the hoop in orbit around your waist.

Rumpus: I think we both know you’re talking about sex. How about this: “Don’t anticipate; respond to it. Push into it when you feel it touch you.”

the bit about sanity

From my girlfriend Julie, who is flying back east this morning because of a family emergency:

“About to board, hula hoop stashed in my bag like a great tube of prozac, like a little personal fence I can put up when ever the crazies get too, well, crazy.”

Jitterbug Hooping

Yesterday being Father’s Day, I spent a couple extra moments talking to the photograph of my dad on my altar. In the photograph, which was taken around 1942 on O’ahu, near Pearl Harbor, he looks serene, bemused, and as though he’d rather be someplace else. That was, apparently, his general take on his time in the Navy during WWII—a subject about which it was hard to get him to talk, when I was old enough to be asking, some 40 years later. He disliked the whole fighting/killing bit (which he avoided by being a radio controller, on the island and for short stints at sea), and would rather have been…

…dancing. Because my dad, David Matthew Conrad (1922-1996), was a champion jitterbug. Get OUT!, right? But it’s true. When he was in his late teens and his twenties, my dad was cutting loose with the hot wild acrobatic jive of the day, swinging the girls upside down, kicking and flapping to the sounds of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, and winning prizes for it. Newspaper accounts of the time used words like frenzy, pandemonium, and ecstasy to describe the jitterbug phenomenon. One psychologist warned of the “dangerously hypnotic influence…(music) cunningly devised to a tempo faster than 72 bars to the minute – faster than the human pulse.”

Thinking about that, about him, something clicked. Just the other day I was talking to Philo about how long it’s taken for me to shake off homogenizing influences of the hoopworld’s hegemony, how I still don’t really know what my own style is any more. He suggested I look back to old videos. I’ve looked, I said. I’m just chaotic, and goofy: I switch planes (from horizontal to vertical to diagonals) really fast and almost continuously… and it’s no fun to watch because it’s so jarring and jagged….

Who told you it’s no fun to watch?, he demanded, getting huffy. How I love Philo.

And so yesterday, on Father’s Day, I met up with the Bay Area Hoopers in Dolores Park, and I just abandoned myself. I flipped and swung and flapped and did crazy happy high steps; I stopped caring about elegance or flow or eye contact with any “audience.” I swayed and swerved and drooped and hopped. And I was thinking, you know, if my dad—the jitterbug dancer, radio crooner, sometimes painter, and closet writer, all those artistic personas beating like a heart under his three-piece suits on his way to work in contract law all those years he Provided for me and my mom— if my dad could see me today—me this crazy hooper, professional writer—oh, he’d be so happy, and so proud.

The Making of HOOPING, Part IV: The Great Butt vs Buns Debate of ‘08

(See Part I, Part II, and Part III here.)

You’re probably wondering what this image of Richard Simmons is doing here. He’s here because he’s what popped into my mind every time I came across the word buns in the manuscript of the HOOPING book.

Buns, you see, is HoopGirl’s preferred word for the rear end. Well, after booty, but booty’s one of those words you have to use sparingly. For moves like BOOTY BLITZ or BOOTY BUMP, there’s no using booty in the step-by-step instructions. See how overwhelming it gets to have booty six times in a single paragraph? Booty! (Seven.)

Myself, I’m partial to the word ass, rhyming as it does with sass and slithering sexily off the tongue. Butt we both knew that asses (or their british cousins, arses) would never fly with our publisher. Then there’s rump, of which I’m also a fan(ny), but it’s just not right for a fitness book. And bum: too British, with that confusing other meaning in American. Bottom: clearly too infantile. Cheeks, trunk, backside, posterior, badonkadonk : none quite appropriate. So, with all the juicy ones benched, that left your standard collection: rear, behind, butt, and buttocks. All of which, even the last, I prefer to buns by a wide-ass margin.

So I’d send a draft of a chapter to Christabel and she’d send it back, and the butts and rears had been transformed into buns, buns and more buns. Richard Simmons, Richard Simmons, and more Richard Simmons! In bright blue spandex, he was, each time, there in my head. I shuddered, replaced the buns with behinds and buttocks.

And so it went, back and forth, the battle of the backsides, with Cbel claiming buns was cute and sexy. And me feeling as uncomfortable as if Richard Simmons was down on bended knee proposing to me each time she spoke the odious thing.

Finally we more or less agreed to divide the sum of all instances between us, and she used her buns in her half, and I peppered my half with my rear and behind and butt. Because that’s how collaboration goes.

And now that it’s all said and done, do I still shudder and picture Richard Simmons each time I see buns in the book? You can bet your bottom dollar on it.

Richard showing off his buns

Late Breaking Symmetry

pretend Lara Croft is hooping in this image

Around the turn of the year between 2006 and 2007, I started seeing a hooper. A male hooper. A straight male hooper. This, not so rare a species as you might think, and generally a hot specimen of maledom, at that. With, um, strong core muscles. I called him Tiger, but let’s call him K.

So K and I had been hooping and hanging out together for a couple weeks when I invited him up to my flat. At the time I lived in the middle of the Castro with a crotchety gay couple in an apartment filled with their 1940s-60s era collectibles—a tacky crew of oilslicklike vaselineglass, gilded porcelain lambs, Mickey Mouse miniatures, vases shaped like corn-on-the-cob, etcetera. Every room but the one I paid $1100/month to keep as my zen respite was filled with the kitsch, to which my roomies were uncommonly attached. One of them noticed if a doily was so much as nudged off center.

So that day K and I did some smooching, turned on some music, and were promptly overcome by the desire to hoop. A common scenario. My roommates were gone for the weekend, so I welcomed K and his hoop into the living room, cautioning him to be extremely cautious about all the shit.

K assured me it would be no problem.

He was really getting into the Zone when he brought the hoop up over his head…and brought down the light fixture. The glass of three lightbulbs and their tuliplike glass shades sprayed across the room. K was mortified. I assured him it was far less tragic than if he’d taken down a tchotchke. I spent the rest of the weekend hunting for replacement shades and ended up having to buy 5 new ones (on K’s tab, at his gentlemanly insistence) so that they all matched.

K and I saw each other for another few weeks and then stopped. (It had nothing do with the accident, really, it didn’t.) We became friends. In fact, he came over to my place to hang out and hoop just this past Friday. I live in a one-room studio now (which is where I do most of my hooping these days as a break from sitting at the computer, so busy with writing work that I usually skip the hoopingatherings and parties) and so we headed into the lobby of my building, a great open space coated in hoop-friendly tile and marble, with 12-foot ceilings. I’ve hooped there before. There are, however, a couple of those overhead light fixtures with the thick glass bowl underneath, suspended from a metal frame, that you have to watch out for. I pointed them out to him and he assured me it would be no problem.

After a while K left the lobby for a quick break and I was really getting into the Groove, doing repeating barrel rolls, lifting my arms in and out of the hoop and dancing. Then, leaning back in Limbo, I lifted the hoop off my waist and over my head. It smacked into the lamp and I watched, in slow-motion, as the fixture swung up and the glass bowl slipped out of its frame and I was powerless to stop it, only able to step back and cover my face with my arms as I realized it was falling, falling towards the tiny hexagonal mosaic floor tiles…. A thousand jaggedy splinters of glass all over the lobby, and folks from my building starting to arrive on Friday afternoon, home early from work. Perfect.

K helped me sweep it up, and we started giggling. Soon we were guffawing. As he would later say in an eloquent email about the Incident: “I find the karmic symmetry in yet another pulverized hanging lamp just delightful.”

And so it is. You hoop, you enter the Zone, you break Shit. Amen.

HOOPING book launch party, SF

Countdown, takeoff, wheeeee! I haven’t come down yet, and the book (and Christabel) will be flying for some time yet…

What a gorgeous night we had at the ever-so-festive Make-Out Room in San Francisco’s Mission district to celebrate the birth of our baby. I kept on whirling around to see yet another body I had to run and wrap my arms around!

From half a lifetime ago, representing my high school days, there was Cruz DeWilde, a mad genius who spends his spare time questioning whether the prevailing model of gravity is, in fact, correct. What better place to contemplate gravity than from within a hoop? He got a special copy of the book that was not only signed but kissed by yours truly, to make up for that time some 20 years back when I was too much the awkward nerdgirl to get to it in the passenger seat of his car.

Then there was the crew of writers from the San Francisco Writers Grotto (where a chunk of the book was written, and where guinea pigs Marianna and Helena tested drafts of the step-by-step instructions for complex moves). There was the superheroic hottie former firefighter turned novelist, Caroline Paul, who is thanked under my Acknowledgements in the book. That’s because when I was at my wit’s end with how to resolve any one of the many crises that arose during the writing, Caroline could be relied upon to provide steady, calm, logical advice. This is a woman who’s good in a crisis. She had John M and Steve M in tow, too, and the latter bought a book for his cute wife Denise cuz he’s hoping she’ll do some gyratin in this Jose Cuervo bikini he got her a while back. Other notable Grotto-ites in attendance were the pretty frackin phenomenal writer Peter Orner, and kindred spirit Chris Colin with his wife Amy Standen. Don’t worry: the two of them left their infant safely in the trunk of the car just so they could come check out the hoopenings without that nagging worry.

My bestest girl Antonella was there, of course. I didn’t get to tell this story in the book, but alongside everything else that hooping brought into my life, it brought me Antonella. We met at my very first HoopGirl hoop class back in August 2006. (If I’m not mistaken that was also Miss Rosie’s first. I remember her tiny dog Romie(?) shivering in the corner, watching the hoops fly.) And it was Antonella who insisted we check out the Bay Area Hoopers, and, once we were there, dragged my butt out of the bushes and into my hoop when I was too shy and overwhelmed by all the hooptalent to do anything but wide-eyed watching. My Antonella. She was there with her husband Roi, who happens to be the talented photographer who shot these back in March.

My worldchanging/sustainability peeps were also in da house: shiny-spirited Erica from the mighty mighty Free Range Studios (creators of The Meatrix and The Story of Stuff) and Quentin who’s supporting folks in the Tenderloin and Deborah who asks Should You Really Be A Lawyer and the remarkable Chid Liberty with the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project and the powerhouse Matt Lewis, whose feet you’ve gotta kiss for keeping the planet from melting.

And then there were the hoopers. Gobs of gorgeous hoopers: Annie, Claudia, Satise, the breathtaking Rich, Michael (whom I also Acknowledged on account of his generous loving and patient ways as one of my most influential hoopguides), Khan, Victor, Rosie, Heather, Jennaluna and Jenny, Corinne, Paige… so many I must be forgiven if I’ve left any off the list. See some stills of the hoopers here.

I think there were between 60 and 70 people who came out, all told, although by the midway point I’d consumed enough champagne that counting got hard … (Thanks to Obid, my friend Sue’s companion, who kept handing me those cute single-serving bottles of the stuff all night, and which by the end I was chugging beer-style, no glass required. Thank goodness my momma was tucked away in Berlin and couldn’t see her daughter commit such an abomination.) The bubbly made my second hooperformance especially exciting, as the hoop went flying out into the audience and towards the bar. Again and again. But everyone just cheered. Oh, joyous shining hooping community, I’ve missed you, while I’ve been off writing about you….

The Making of HOOPING, Part III

(See Part I and Part II.)

The book’s out and about now. I’ve eagerly showed my first copy off to anyone who seems interested, in all my worlds (writing, family, hooping, worldchanging). Folks frequently comment on the JOY emanating from its pages. It is a happy-feeling book, isn’t it. One diligent peruser flipped through every single spread, studying the pages. When he finished it he turned to me: I was looking to see if there were any photos where people didn’t look as though they were having the Time of their Lives. Everyone looks SO HAPPY.

Well, that’s how hooping makes you feel. So that’s what the photos reflect.

That said, the step-by-step photos that accompany the instructions for moves are not necessarily smile-inducing shots. So let’s give a lot of credit where credit is due– to the whole crew that made those shiny faces possible. (Of course I don’t mean literally shiny, dear Danica, our wonderful makeup artiste…)

We booked the studio where those photos were shot on two separate occasions, for two and three day sessions, respectively. First came the test shoot. The models (Dawn, Natasha aka Silverstar, Jennaluna, as well as Christabel and myself) were supposed to treat it just like the real shoot: come fully rested, having hydrated and slept well for at least days if not a week before the shoot, with radiant skin, well-groomed finger- and toenails, and a lot of energy. Scott the photographer and Kramer the producer kept busy trying different effects to show the publisher (Workman Publishing). We only did a sampling of the moves that would be covered in the real shoot/in the book, and we had a blast, producing some of the images you’ll find here on the Outtakes page of the book site.

Then came the real shoot, a 3 day affair in November (2008). Here’s the logistics email that Christabel sent out to the models:

Hi ladies,

Now is the time to get pumped with excitement! Your super hot images are going to inspire thousands of women to hoop! Yahoo! We have a wonderful makeup artist named Danica for those who have not met her yet.   Below you will find a list of the studio location, times, what to bring and a tentative timeline with your daily arrival times.  Each of you also have an excel document with your name on it with the images we will be taking of you. There is also a master document with all 420 itemized images for Scott and Netta from Workman.

If you have any questions, call me! You are all going to do fantastic and look gorgeous.

xoxo

Christabel

TO BRING

Your beautiful self! Smiley, mani-pedi-ed (extra important for those close up foot and hand shots!), NO TANS per Workman request, esp Dawn

Reading material/hobby/cellphone to keep yourself occupied during wait times

Snacks for yourself and to share

Beverages of your choice and water

No earrings please, or jewelry. If you have stretched lobes please put in neutral plugs.

TENTATIVE SHOOT TIMELINE

SUNDAY

7am arrival Netta, Christabel, Kramer and Scott for prelighting, equipment check, complete wardrobe selection

8:30 am arrival Danica

9am arrival Ariane

8:30-9:15/30 makeup/hair/first wardrobe for Christabel

10am-1pm Christabel photos (Images 100-146)

1-1:45 lunch break

1:45-4:30 Christabel photos 100-146

3:30-430 Hair makeup for Ariane

430-7pm Ariane photos

MONDAY

7am arrival Netta, Jenna, christabel, Kramer, Scott, Dawn, Danica

7-8:00 Hair/makeup/wardrobe for Dawn, Jenna

8-10 Dawn photos

10-1 Jenna photos

11:45 Natasha arrival

11:45-12:45 Natasha hair and makeup

1-1:45 lunch break

2-5 Group photos

5-7 Natasha photos

**At the end of the day on monday we will assess what kind of progress we have made and if this schedule actually worked! So everyone needs to make themselves available on tuesday until we know for sure what has been completed by monday night.

TUESDAY

7am arrival Netta, Christabel, Kramer, Scott, Danica

7-7:45 Hair and makeup Christabel

8-11am  Christabel (Images 146-200- Routines)

9am arrival Ariane, Natasha, Jenna, Dawn??? TBC for overflow….

****everyone else should plan on arriving at 10am for hair and makeup and being available until 7pm. Again, we won’t know our progress until monday night.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Phew!, right?!

Of course everything took longer than expected. With the very first model we went at least an hour and a half longer than we’d budgeted for. It turns out that taking a move that you usually do in a matter of seconds (like lifting the hoop from your waist to above your head, called “Float” in the HoopGirl lexicon) and breaking it into its component parts for a series of still shots is really hard. We’d decided to use regular size beginner’s hoops throughout the instructional pages, too, which weigh several ounces more than the ultralights that all of us are regularly using to hoop with these days. Try using just one hand to hold a hoop like that flat on the horizontal plane (parallel to the ground), without letting it droop. It’s almost impossible! Then do it again and again and again, while radiating joy and beaming a huge smile. And do it for hours under hot lights in clothing that you may not feel totally comfortable in. Can we give it up for our tirelessly smiley models, please?

In the evening hours of the final day of the shoot, after we’d let all the other girls go, I was assisting Christabel to get through all of her shots. We were racing against the clock, madly trying to finish all the routines at the back of the book and then shoot a cover image, and Christabel was pulling out shot after shot like the pro she is. Oftentimes she’d get it in a single take. (Compare that to as many as 15 takes for a single shot of the rest of us models! Hey, we’ve had way less experience.)

And then: technical meltdown. Honestly I can’t even remember whether it was the flash sync cable or the lens or what that needed to be replaced, but things basically imploded on the set (and oh, did I mention the deafening clap earlier that day when one of the lights or something exploded? For a split second we thought Scott might have, well, exploded along with it– before he emerged from behind the backdrop, a little dazed but unharmed.) Christabel, in full makeup and outfit, just laid down on the couch and practiced deep breathing. I fidgeted and ran calculations in my head about what it would cost if we had to return to the studio for another day, and how long we could extend the night that night without paying for it in crappy shots.

About an hour later Scott and Kramer returned with the necessary parts. Christabel turned on a laughter yoga track to raise her energy and her spirits– a recording of different people laughing hysterically. I had to giggle; I can’t help it–the laughter tracks always work infectiously upon me. Not so for the boys: Kramer rolled his eyes and looked pained; Scott gritted his teeth: whatever the model wanted, the model got. After a bit of shooting, though, Scott was like: I can’t take it any more. We switched over to some peppy dance music.

In the last moments of that grueling last day, Christabel nailed it. Bright, radiant, expressive shot after shot after shot. I was in awe. Really, check out the book and then guess if you can tell which photos are from after the meltdown. I dare you.

Then we broke out a bottle of champagne and got real silly, the few, the proud, the photovictorious.

you win some, you hoop some

I am a stressbunny with work right now! Here’s me blowing off steam at the mid-point of a 14-hour day…! xxHG

wholly hoop innovators!

I love these men. Taking the art to new heights, they are.

To my unrelenting disappointment, I had to have a surgery the morning of The Flow Show, and so had to miss this and all the amazing performances. I was there in spirit.