Prancing in the Dark

Recently, I spent a little time with one of my idols. Someone who has gone head to (camel) toe with the other competition in the health and fitness industry and really made a name for herself. I'm talking, of course, about Joanna Rorhback, the founder of Prancercise.


Dear God! I look terrified.

She came through DC to offer classes and prancercise her way through the streets of Chinatown. (Can you imagine looking up from your Scorpion bowl to see that moving down the street?) About one millisecond after the classes were announced, my neighbor e-mailed me telling me to pick a time to go with her. This past Saturday was that day.

As a nod to the prancercise style, I coiffed my hair and wore a statement necklace. Others in the class of eleven people were not quite as subtle. There was a mother-and-daughter team all decked out in nonsense (meaning head to toe leopard gear and skintight gold lame shorts) and another couple of friends who looked as though they had been styled by Richard Simmons.

Which all would have made for an extremely fun class if  only someone had let Joanna in on the joke.

From the moment we met her, we realized that this woman is 100% sincere about her exercise program and does not realize that she is first and foremost a personality, and secondly an exercise guru.

This realization made the mother decked out in a leopard leotard dissolve into giggles, at one point completely turning her back to her gold-lame-shorts-bedecked daughter because looking at her would make her laugh even harder. Joanna's response to this? Asking the mother to come to the front of the class and stand next to her, as though she was a first grader being scolded. (This same woman was scolded again later in class for suggesting that we "dance" some more. Joanna gave her a look of disdain then corrected her, saying, "we can PRANCERCISE" some more.")

(Aside: When I temped during college breaks, I worked in one office where I asked a co-worker where I could find a manila folder. She also corrected me with about the same level of disdain, saying, "the VANILLA folders are in the cabinet over there.) Live and learn, I say.

Perhaps the biggest disappointments were that the 90 minute class lasted just 60, that Joanna had merch on display BUT NOT FOR SALE, and that even though I ran a half marathon a few weeks prior to this and felt great after, I limped away from Prancercise with shin splints and a sore calf. I would be completely humiliated, but thankfully our classmates took the focus completely away from my prancercise injuries: