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My Stardust Melody!
AS YOU KNOW, I’m in the “Silver Sneakers” jazzaerobacise class at my gym. Oh, it’s for women and men, that’s not the problem. But it is for seniors.
I get around this with a cheap white curly fright wig I bought at Party City and a pair of old glasses I fished out of one of those donation boxes at LensCrafters when no one was looking. (Which reminds me – I need to get a different pair because I’ve had four people mistake me for Stan Freberg and they won’t leave me alone until I autograph their boxes of Jeno’s Pizza Rolls.)
By the way, it’s not that I can’t keep up in a regular class with people my own age – I probably could. But why bother? In this class, Christ, I’m so much better than everyone else. I never get winded!
One of the exercises is moving your ankles, one at a time, around in a little circle and we’re all sitting on chairs! I’m serious! Then we do this marching thing, standing up, right? But we’re only moving our arms up and down.
Then there’s the little vinyl-covered weights we use. Everyone else uses the wussy little pink ones…? I use the next size up, the little blue ones, which are a full eight ounces heavier!
I tell you, I’m an iron man triathlete compared to these people! It’s doing wonders for my self-esteem!
Last week that pain-in-the-ass Vivian “Here I Go Again About My Shoulder Spur Surgery” Kovac gets wheeled out on a stretcher when she suddenly starts complaining about some tightness in her chest.
But me…? I’m ready for another go-round of toe-pointing. Fire up the Andrews Sisters CD and let’s get back to work! Ol’ Vivian’ll be fine!
So I got there early yesterday and the exercise studio was still locked so I had to hang out in the room with all the weight machines until our instructor “Luz” (She’s Hispanic!) got there. They’ve got TV monitors hanging from the ceiling in this room and one’s tuned to Fox News – yeah, yeah: boo, hiss, whee, hooray, whatever, I don’t care, this isn’t a political blog so knock it off, before I have you all deported!
…With free healthcare!
Anyway, they had this guy on there who I’ve seen before and I finally learned his name: Charles Krauthammer. And the thing is, every time I’ve seen him, he brings someone else to mind – and you know exactly what I’m going to say because you think the same thing:
The guy looks exactly like Hoagy Carmichael from that episode of “The Flintstones!”
Look! Look!
He doesn’t look like the real Hoagy Carmichael, whose face didn’t seem so angular and craggy, but he’s the spitting image of the cartoon version!
Which brings up an important point: Why did Hoagy Carmichael retain his twentieth century monicker on “The Flintstones” while no one else did?
Here’s my guess: He was the show’s first guest star and the writers hadn’t yet hit perfected their stone-age celebrity naming algorithm as they would in later seasons with Jimmy O’Neill (“Jimmy O’Neillstone”), Jimmy Darren (“Jimmy Darrock”), and The Beau Brummels (“The Beau Brummelstones”).
But if they manage to renegotiate that deal with underused wunderkind (industry term!) Sean McFarling and finally reboot (“rebarefoot”) “The Flintstones” and then remake specific episodes, and then reanimate Hoagy Carmichael’s corpse so he can re-record his lines, here are some suggestions:
- Craggy Carmichael (since his caricature is so craggy, itself a “rock” word).
- Hoagy Carbonmichael
- Hoagy Carmichshale
- Hydroboracite Carbonmicashale (my favorite and I’m sure there’s plenty of petrographers out there who would appreciate the joke)
Or, instead of using Hoagy, when they redo the episode where Fred and Barney try to write a hit song, they could enlist the help of Charles Craghammer (Eh? Eh…?!) to get it airplay on the Rox News Network or something! See what I did there?!
Whew, all this brainstorming has me beat! I think I’ll have a pizz-, have a pizz-, have a pizza roll!
Man, these things are good but I’m going to be paying for all the extra calories on Friday’s class. (Tomorrow’s was canceled so we can go to Viv’s memorial.)
Ted Parsnips
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