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Never one to take any endeavor lightly, once she has made up her mind to commit to it, she immediately began taking lessons from one of the proprietors of the gym, Johnnie Love, an ex-professional wrestler and quickly began to shape up, to become stronger and to have more endurance. Soon she met a woman soul mate, Laura Mudrack, who also happened to be a chiropractor as well as a body-builder trainer. Laura was able to apply a woman's point of view to Gypsy's training and to help her through some of the more difficult phases of body-building, as well as teaching her how to teach. When Laura quit fitness training to devote full time to her chiropracty, Gypsy hooked up with Keith Thompson, himself a champion body-builder and fitness trainer, to begin practicing her new profession. Never a big money maker it nevertheless got her deeply engaged in a world that neither she nor I had ever known much about.

Yes, it is true. Watching her transform back into a good facsimile of her youthful pulchritude more or less shamed me into joining her at the gym, where I began interrupting my computer travails each day to work out for an hour or so. I mean, if you had this woman sleeping with you every night, wouldn't you try to shape up? Not only did I regain most of the muscle mass I had lost over the years of sedentary activity (except for my brief encounter with weights in the joint), but I lost most of my pot belly and about fifteen pounds of excess weight. Delighted with the outcome (the photograph shown in the article The first day in the rest of my life... was taken when I was closing in on age 60 and she on 53).

When I started our Web site in January of 1995, I asked Gypsy if she would contribute a fitness sub-site. She graciously agreed to do so, and, by working her butt off for several months, went live with her site, The Gift of Youth, during the spring of that year, right about the time that Roger's famous Teen Movie Critic hit the big time by being featured on Netscape's What's Cool list. In my humble opinion, she did a magnificent job of constructing this site. Of course, I helped her with the computer specific tasks and contributed some of the hyperlinking ideas, but almost all of the site came out of her fertile mind and assiduous labors. Not quite as facile as I with the written word (she is far MORE engaging verbally in person than I), it took her a lot more time than I to do the writing. But, she did it and did it well. If you have not seen her site, I suggest you go there soon and take a look. This is especially true if you are nearing or in middle age yourself and feel a little rusty in the hinges.

Everything was going along swell, when one day, the other proprietor of the Gym, Terry, informed me that he had some "personal" information to pass on to me. Taking me aside, he whispered that many patrons of the gym were complaining about my smell and handed me a small can of Right Gaurd and suggested that I "use it."

"What!" I exclaimed. "This is a fucking gym not an opera house or dining room! Doesn't everybody smell when they are sweating?" Embarrassed a bit by the stink I was making (pun intended), Terry said, "Not as much as you, I am afraid. Why don't you just try using this deodorant and...perhaps...bathing a little more regularly...and see how it goes." I glanced around the room. There were only a few patrons working out, all women. Since no babe had ever complained to me before about my odor...my impression was that I smelled rather funky-sexy if you know what I mean...and Gypsy SURELY does not mind it...I had a rather hard time accepting what I was being told. However, one of the patrons present was Joan Growe, the erstwhile Secretary of State of the State of Minnesota, along with her female companion. A woman about my age, perhaps she had been hanging around government people too long and no longer remembered what a "real man" smelled like. And, it was true, that most of my social/sexual experience with women had been with the hair-under-the-arms hippy variety. Some of those ladies REALLY laid down some funk, let me tell you. In fact, I believe it was the omnipresent odor of un-deodorized people liberally mixed with pheromone, that augmented the truly magnificent sex life on the hippy commune, but that too is another story. Anyway, to this day I am not sure that it wasn't just Terry who objected to my scent, but I decided to give his "plan" a try. Also, when I got home, I asked my kids what they thought. Roger sort of shrugged, but Miranda was very clear, "I got news for you, Dad. Both you and Mom smell like skunks! Sometimes, when you are exercising down here (the kids lived upstairs in the duplex which is our family home) I have to run away in fear that your stench will stick to me when I go to work."

I guess things have changed a bit in the nineties. Or, maybe other people were just to polite to tell me. So it goes...

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I complied with the stink-police. Buying my very own can of Right Guard, the manly-man's perfume, I liberally applied it before going to the gym and upped my bathing schedule from once to twice weekly (all I can stand).

To no avail!

Even with this concession to societal norms, I could not get my wondrous odor down to an acceptable level for the gym. Terry repeatedly warned me, in a hushed voice, that I HAD to do something about it. Finally I simply gave up and began to confine my exercise regime to our home. This satisfied everybody except Miranda, who still complains. Which reminds me, I haven't done my step aerobics yet today.

See you tomorrow...

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