the crocodile will not make love to me

today we met bikram. as much as i'd planned to be aloof and above it all, i found myself giddy and punch drunk with anticipation when his impending arrival was announced. i mean, look, i've done this practice for years now, i've heard all the stories (good and bad), and i've seen countless photos of this man superimposed atop a tiger or levitating in front of the taj mahal.
i've even seen his music c.d. on the retail shelf at my studio. i've never seen anyone actually purchase it, but still....

so, despite my best efforts at cool, my shakti shorts were in just as much of a wad as everyone else's.

turns out he's a wee little thing. a dumpling of a man. a caricature of himself almost.
he arrived in alarming amounts of white. shirt, shoes, pants, baseball cap. his thin cotton candy hair floated like a wispy black cloud above his shoulders. within three short hours he had changed into his second ensemble of the day; a metallic silver shorts and shirt set. finally, he made it all the way down to the speedo. during the dinner break, and before class, my new friend, leslie, saw him in the hotel salon getting a blow out. a blow out. i am smiling, ear to ear, as i write that wonderful wonderful sentence.
his wardrobe, like his personality, is equal parts hideous and utterly enchanting.
try to look away. just try....

where raj, his wife, is linear and maternal and clear, bikram is a collision course of ideas and analogies and exclamations.
to drive home his suggestion that we not stray too far from our lodging, he launched into this story about a girl named "kiki".
kiki, it seems, left training one weekend to drive to vegas and visit her incarcerated husband. she had a terrible accident, her car flipped four times, and she ended up hospitalized. he took a long pause before informing us that, because of her coma, she "wasn't able to finish teacher training."
comments weren't welcome at this point, but i felt compelled to point out that kiki (a woman with seven broken bones, a husband in prison, and a totaled car) had far bigger problems than not getting her imaginary degree from yoga college.
i'm just saying.....

he loves, as well, to compare our two month memorization campaign to ivy league universities. at least two or three times he claimed that getting into harvard medical school or yale business school was "nothing" compared to our being accepted into this competitive program of his. and, were he anything other than exactly what he is, you'd seriously want to knock the guy down a notch or two and say, "get over yourself." but, for reasons i don't even understand, you do not want to do that at all. you just want to applaud and laugh and allow the little dumpling with his salon straightened hair his moment of joy.
i realize all too well that he is human and tricky and will absolutely piss me off in weeks to come.
i know this.
but, for today, i find him charming and jubiliant and divine.

after a long afternoon of stories and myths and morals and jokes, bikram began his list of what we can and can not do over the course of this training.
essentially, what we can do is yoga.
what we can not do is everything else one might hope to do on extended vacation....
and i mean everything.
in a moment that will never stop sending chills up my spine, he quieted the room and announced there was to be "no kissy kissy. no f**ky f**ky". these were his actual words.
to be fair, hearing it called that kills any desire one might have had to do it......

to top things off, and in case we hadn't understood the rule, bikram then told me and my 309 new platonic friends that
"the crocodile will not make love to you. he will come to your bedroom and eat your legs."
all makes sense now.
glad we cleared that up.

the lectures were followed by a short break and then our first class...which i might have enjoyed more had i not been one of the nine yogis stuck in elevator #3 for almost an hour and a half while waiting for the ilikai maintenance staff to get us out.
we arrived in class just after triangle pose and just before one girl passed out and three ten foot mirrors came falling down off the walls......
its the best worst place ever.