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the 100 strangers shot (the "mermaid"!)
Yesterday a postcard arrived in the mail, blaring amplified orange sunsets and artificially blue water and skies and the word Miedzyzdroje, which turns out to be the name of a Polish resort town on the Baltic. The card was from my mother, who apparently went on a golfing retreat there. Another golfing trip! This is the third or fourth she’s done in the last year or so, by my count.
So. I had a hard time adjusting to her new pastime at first (smacking of class privilege as it does, not to mention the herbicides, pesticides, dyes, fertilizers and other pollutants, and excessive water use…). However, at some point this Debbie Downer over here decided to squash my judgment and embrace it. My mum seems continuously happier than she’s been for at least 15 years, what with all that fresh air and walking and perfecting of her craft. Last time she called me the first words out of her mouth were: “I’m down to 18!,” meaning her handicap (and for the record, I can’t remember the exact number she told me, because these numbers have zero significance to me. But I’m pretty sure it was somewhere in the upper teens.)
The funny thing is, she went through a similar evolution in her feelings about my hooping, at first dismayed by general “suggestiveness” of the dance, and close to disgusted by the outfits she saw me and the Allstars wearing, and then gradually realizing it was keeping me in better shape, and happier, than I’ve been at any other time in my life. (That includes the period when I was actually skinnier and more toned, during the couple of years when I worked out 5 days a week at the gym, mostly on stairmasters and ellipticals, fueled by my desire to keep my ex-husband’s wandering eyes on me… an era that my mother called “too thin and gaunt,” and during which I was certainly not very happy.)
The other aspect of all this that amuses me is that we are not a sporty family. Or a family that cultivated any kind of physical skills (unless you count knitting, sewing, cooking, gardening as physical, and all but the last would be quite a stretch in my book).
My father as I knew him was an intellectual, not a sportsm/fan (although yes, he was a jitterbugger in his first few decades). He did not watch sports (ever), we did not play catch together (ever), and we shared an indulgently-smiling tolerance of the annual father/daughter “field day,” an all-school (grades K-12) celebration of sportiness that made clear this stuff was not our forte. (Although I think once I won a ribbon for the 3-legged race, coming in second place—the three-legged race, being less about physical prowess, and more about partnership and communication, was one of the few events at which I stood any chance at all.) Give us a read-a-thon any day.
And while my classmates’ mothers were having tennis dates, squash dates, sometimes even golf dates, in the way that privileged women do, my mother was ashamed of never having learned how to do any of those things, having grown up in a pretty frugal postwar Germany, and never joined them in any of it. (Although she tried hard to get her daughter to embrace those kinds of upper-ish class trappings, sending me to ballet and tennis classes, both of which I totally disliked and bailed on. She tried so hard to persuade me to take horseback riding lessons, which most girls would have been stoked about!, but not me. Looking back I’m still not clear why I had such an aversion to all those pastimes. An unaccountably pinko child, I was. Ok, am.)
So I head off to my hooping gatherings and retreats, while mi madre goes to her golfing things, and so we nurture our happy, luscious bodies. Who woulda thunk it?
About a week after I placed my orders, the stuff started arriving. First the connectors, then the tapes, and finally, delivered literally right to my door on the sixth-floor of my building by the nice Fed-Ex man, the tubing (image #1). Within ten days, I had everything I needed.
I took the ratcheting cutter in hand and started cutting the lengths for the hoops. (Image #2) I made some closer to 40” in diameter, and some closer to 36”, and one that was 34” just for variety. The most important thing about cutting the tubing is getting a straight, flat cut—precisely perpendicular—so that the two ends fit together without a gap. (If your cut is at all slanty, the two ends won’t sit flat against each other, which means you’ll have a gap in the surface of the hoop.)
While doing my cuts, I heated a pot of water on the stove. When it was steaming, I dipped one end of a cut length in the water (image #3) for about 20 seconds to soften the tube so it would accept the insert connector. A sigh of relief as the connector fit perfectly inside (with some light persuasion from a hammer- image #4). Because I’d ordered everything online from separate vendors, I’d been worried the parts might not match.
I stuck the other end of the tubing in the hot water, and brought it down over the exposed end of the connector. See how my knuckles and fingers are white with the exertion (image #5) of pushing the ends together? You want as little of a gap at the connection point as possible so you have to put some muscle into it. But be careful! The plastic tubing retains its heat for a while. Don’t let your kids do this part, and if you’re heat sensitive maybe wear some grippy garden gloves.
Finally, I took some vinyl tape and went around the seam a couple times. (image #6) Voila! A naked hoop, ready for taping.
I was about to say—and now for everyone’s favorite part. But I’ve actually met a fair number of folks who say they hate the taping part because it’s so futzy. I guess it depends a little on how much of a perfectionist you are.
There are several nice discussion threads and tutorials on hooptaping.
So. For my first hoop, I decided to use up some of the white 1” gaffers I had on hand for a first layer (images #7 +8). I don’t really like this tape so much: I prefer narrower widths (ie, ¾” rather than 1”), because the narrower the tape, the more control I seem to have over it while wrapping, and the less likely I am to get wrinkles. I tend to stand while taping, keeping the vertical hoop steady with a foot or between my legs, so I have both hands free. I pass the roll of tape back and forth between my hands, hugging the tape to the angle of the hoop, and feeling along the bit I’ve just put on to keep it smooth and wrinkle-free.
I decided to do a second layer with the same white tape since the uncovered space (naked black tubing) was too wide to be covered with ¾” tape. (Image #9). It came out a long way from perfect—see image #10 for the closer-up shot showing all the gaps and wrinkles! (It looks better from afar, image #11.) Thus, I’d advise you to not use your favorite tape on your first hoop. Every subsequent tape job gets smoother, in my experience, as you get a feel for how to pull and maneuver the tape into place.
I took a ¼” purple vinyl tape to cover up the remaining bits of black (images # 12 + 13). This stuff goes on super fast and easy—very gratifying. And so my first homemade hoop was completed.
The next one I made used a 1” orange “camouflage” fabric/gaffers tape as the base layer, with a ¾” orange vinyl tape as the top layer. The camo tape was wonderful to work with—very forgiving. I liked the way the “tiger” hoop turned out so much, I made an extra one for me to keep!
Then I did some in blue/black/grey color schemes with 3 layers of tape each, criss-crossing the 2nd and 3rd layers.
Finally, I felt brave enough to deal with some glitter tape (pink) which I combined with ¾” pink harness tape and ½” grey gaffers. Basically: if you’re using a fancy reflective tape (mirrored, prismatic, glitter, etc), you want to put it on first. These tapes have very little give or stretch to them, so you can’t pull them into position the way you can the fabric (gaffers) or vinyl-type tapes—not to mention they have a backing that you have pull off as you’re unrolling the tape. They are more likely to get little bubbles and wrinkles in them as you’re laying them down. (Wrinkles are not only unsightly, more importantly they can actually hurt your skin, especially your hands, as the hoop rolls over you.) These tapes also become brittle at the edges as time passes, and are likely to flake off/lift off the hoop. So you put them down first and cover their edges with a layer of either gaffers or vinyl.
Do try this at home.
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.”
(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
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….
hoops make great sock dryers when, for example, the dryers are all busted, or you’ve run out of quarters.
hoopdryer
I sent my 64-year-old momma a hoop last Xmas.
Although she’s the right age to have embraced a Wham-o special as a girl, that was the kind of thing that didn’t enter the impoverished postwar childhood she had in Germany.
I didn’t know whether she’d actually use it—this is a woman who’s got circa-1950s ideas about a lot of things. Like, she lets a gift certificate expire that I gave her for a massage at her local Aveda salon in Berlin, because she feels uncomfortable lying down on a table in partial undress and allowing herself to be touched like that. Who considers manicures and pedicures “a waste of money,” who believes that psychotherapy is only for “crazy people,” and who thinks it’s kind of perverted if I turn off the electricity and light candles while taking a bath. Suffice it to say that lots of things about my woo-woo NoCal lifestyle give her “the willies.”
But she’d been very excited to see how hooping had honed my figure the last time I visited her (November 2007), so I figured What the Heck, I’ll give her a hoop and see what happens.
She was a little intimidated to try at first, and I just left her alone after my long and detailed email in which I described the basic forward-back push from the hips that we use to keep it going around the waist.
Then, on February 22, I got an excited email from her saying she’d found a place to do it (in her grandiose bathroom, in front of the vanity mirror) and that she could already keep it going for 14 spins before it fell down—in contrast to the first day she’d tried, when it dropped immediately.
And just a week after that, there came another email announcing she was up to 500 rounds with dropping the hoop.
I smiled hard at the image of my mother dutifully counting each revolution (four hundred twenty one, four hundred twenty two, four hundred twenty three…) and harder at the sound of the pride that came through in her emailed voice. I wrote her back with congratulations and gently told her that most of us in the hooping community measure our sessions more by the length of practice time, which might start being a better metric for her now that she was approaching a thousand revolutions.
I suggested she try moving her feet while sustaining the waisthooping as the next challenge to master, and told her about how in Hoopgirl classes we celebrate the sound of the hoop clattering to the floor because it means we’re pushing beyond our comfort zone and trying something new.
And I’m really looking forward to my next visit, so I can teach her some fun moves and expand her repertoire.
Have you outfitted your parent with a hoop yet?
