so God walks into a bar

The Bikram organization has its own sort of active trinity.
Bikram is the brains.
Rajashree, his wife, is the heart.
Emmy Cleaves, their principal teacher, the soul and the conscience.

I can’t imagine this place in the absence of any one of these people and their elements.
It would be incomplete, it would crumble into itself…every one of them sustains, validates, and sometimes excuses the other of them.

Emmy arrived this week and I won’t try to say anything original about her because its all been said. An 81 year old yogi, she’s spellbinding and as fully evolved and preserved a person as I have ever met. I should probably value , primarily, her knowledge and information…she brings an abundance of each of those things…but, oddly, what I most appreciate from her is how she allows us to feel about him, Bikram. In moments where we seriously question his perspective, his intention, and (I have to admit) his sanity…we can see her (in either our literal or figurative periphery) appreciating him and accepting him… and we can trust him by proxy. Through her, we can trust him. She's a bridge, carrying us over the gaps in our collective faith.

And her esteem of the guy is as real as it is unsentimental. She contradicts any number of his opinions, and she doesn’t dilute her own ideas against the backdrop of his. They go head to head sometimes. She even sits by as he launches into yet another celebrity related saga or grandiose proclamation with a slightly detectable “oh god...here we go again…” look on her face. Like the wife who’s heard all the stories five hundred times. And she knows the fish gets slightly bigger each time the tale is retold.

But here’s the thing:
Simply put, she deeply loves and respects him. And simply put, he deeply loves and respects her.
To sit in the presence of such unwavering mutual affection and mutual dignity is a wonderful place to be.
Its a place you hope to inhabit someday yourself...with someone you don't have to agree with to agree with.

She will mention who he was when she met him, decades ago—which, by all accounts, was a very different incarnation than the man we now know. Very modest, very traditional, very…well, Indian. And she will tell you that, from time to time, she still sees that in him. She still sees strains of his youthful purity, virtually undetectable to the naked eye. She sees it beneath the ostentatious gold watch, the shiny gangster outfits, the microphone permanently attached to his mouth.
And maybe its an optical illusion—maybe it’s the mind playing tricks on us--but when she says she sees it, you’re sure you saw it too. Even if just for a minute. You’re certain you saw it too.

This week was the start of anatomy class. I’m in fervent prayer that Dr. Frank Trapani taught every other teacher I know because I desperately need to compare notes when I get back to New York.

Dr.T, as we call him, is a chiropractor and holistic/medical junkie. He’s on a bunch of professional boards, he’s written a few books, and he teaches weekly bible study classes. Much like I had no choice but to love Shelly for once being a street cart vendor in Brooklyn, I have no choice but to unconditionally love Frank Trapani for teaching weekly bible study classes.
He had me at hello…..

We have Dr.T two hours a day and the schedule goes a bit like this:

12:00-12:10—jokes. ( Dr. T likes to open with a bit of comedy. His jokes are archaic, corny, and best suited to church socials or variety shows performed at assisted living facilities. For we, the students, it can be difficult to transition from “funny according to Bikram” to “funny according to Frank Trapani”…Bikram-joke’s tend to start with “so, this woman gets raped, right? You follow me? you know rape? Like she get screwed! The boom boom!…”
Whereas Frank’s jokes are more of the, “so a guy says to God….” variety. One gets moral whiplash going back and forth between the two.

12:10-12:35—basic anatomy and physiology lecture.

12:35-40—one or two more jokes. Clean family jokes. He transitions without pause, ending one sentence with “the nerve innervates at the tibial shaft” and starting the next sentence with “so this guy finds himself in heaven…”
Some of his jokes seem slightly anti-Semitic, but I don’t think Dr. T gets it.
I don’t think Dr. T gets a lot of things. Like say, how to pronounce “erector spinae” or “pubis bones” (which he insists on calling the “pubes”. This makes me insane. Everyone knows the term “pubes” refers to hairs, not bones.)

12:40-1:30—more anatomy. More strange pronunciations.

!:30-2:00—the best part. Hands down. At exactly half past the hour of one, Dr. T embarks on the most alarmist, paranoid speeches I have ever heard about nutrition, Western diets, and how our government is essentially performing assisted suicide on all of us. At least twice this week, he has mournfully broken to us the bad news that about 65% of us are already lost causes…half way in our graves…poisoned by FDA approved toxins and hideous bacterias that will land us six feet under any day now. Really. Any day now. I think he’s slightly surprised none of us keeled off during the time it took him to tell us that. We’re dead men walking, almost all of us. Inevitably, some sad soul will raise their quivering hand and ask what we can do to reverse the damage, to rid ourselves of this evil death sentence.
Frank will shrug, a mere mortal incapable of redeeming a lost world, and look at us sadly while saying, “unfortuneately, nothing.” This happens every day. Every single day.

He’ll usually wrap it up by suggesting we buy his book on nutrition, for sale on the tables outside the room ( its $24.99 but he said, “just give me $25”). One day he went into an uncomfortable and not-just-a-little-bit unsettling speech about how we, the ladies, should be douching with yogurt. He then described in detail how one might do that.
A lot of us had been including yogurt into our daily diet. We don’t anymore. Its hard to look at Yoplait the same way now. I’m sure you understand….

I delight in Frank Trapani.
I delight in his conspiracy theories about ecoli.
And I really want to go to church with him one day.

Week two is almost over. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… This is the best worst place ever.
I do a bit of bitching and moaning…but mostly I do a lot of yoga and a lot of laughing.
No big complaints. Not yet anyway. Hopefully I’ll have a couple of bad weeks. I’m really funny when I’m miserable….