Pooch Posturing

On the stairmaster this morning I was surfing channels. (Love to multi-task on the stairmaster, helps kill the deadly boredom of the gym. In fact, starimasters have so little popularlity these days, having been replaced with the sleek elliptical trainers, the tough treadmills and the spinning bikes, that my stairmaster -- and it is mine -- noone else uses them, and even the gym staff call it mine -- faces the wall instead of the prime real estate of the window. But I digress.)

Eager to not watch Bush spew his pandering rhetoric to the NAACP, which was being taped live on most cable news networks, I was looking for relief. I thought I had come across some kind of View-like talk show with Daisy Fuentes interviewing that woman who is on all the time and I never recognize her from any actual show, but her name is Rinna. Anyway, they were talking about pilates. How does Rinna always look so good (and with so much makeup on, not sure how Daisy could tell, any who.) and Rinna says, oh, it's the pilates. Then they cut to her doing her little pilates routine and she's talking about how after she had her second child, her stomach was "shot." As an ad for the pilates tape flashed on the screen, I realized I was watching an infomercial. Punked! Star after star gave their testimonial on camera. Virginia Madsen said it helped her lose her post-pregnancy pounds, since she wasn't one of those stars who just "bounced back."

I know it's a total fantasy, but I just kept waiting for Daisy to ask Rinna in her interview: so why is having a hard pooch so important? What does it give you? Fulfillment? Accomplishment? Fighting gravity? Fighting being fired? I know stars are held to a different standard, but they're beaming into homes at seven in the morning to women with their new-borns thinking: I can be like Rinna. But they were selling pilates like another quick fix to women who weren't really broken to begin with. At least it was more entertaining than Bush.