. . . and you feel an irresistible urge to crack wise. But when she says, "Exhale as if through your feet," you find yourself willing to play along.

For years now, my wife has been urging me to take yoga classes with her or massage classes with her or even woodworking classes with her. She has urged me and urged me. I have ignored her and ignored her. Our marriage is the very picture of blissful symbiosis.

But when she found out that the community college where I teach has a yoga class available immediately following my last class of the week, she decided that we absolutely had to enroll.

Considering that the two of us recently 'enrolled' in a season's worth of opera that has been sheer misery, I told her that I found her enthusiasm about the yoga class to be precipitate at best and something close to homicidally antagonistic at worst.

"If only there was some way for us to know whether we would actually like it before we enrolled," I said. And I thought I had her trapped. I thought I had chicken-before-the-egged her by making it seem as if we couldn't possibly try yoga until we had already tried yoga.

And I thought my cleverness was appropriate because such conundrums are the exact kind of infuriating nonsense that I'm accustomed to hearing from so-called yoga masters. After all, exercise is bad enough. The last thing I need while I'm huffing and puffing is to have some wiseguy with a shaved head pelting me with koans. I've got your sound of one hand clapping right here, buddy.

My little catch-22 turned out not to be nearly as clever as I imagined. My wife went to the video store and combed through the bargain bin for any tape on yoga. The cheapest one she could find (the only one, actually) was Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss.

Now I'm just an ordinary guy with the ordinary preconceptions about yoga. And I'll tell you that it seems to me that even if yoga is as excellent a form of exercise as some people say it is, it can't be terribly effective as a method of losing weight. There may be data to the contrary; I don't know. As for me, I've only done the exercises on the tape three times, so it's not quite fair for me to expect a noticeable reduction in my weight. But I will say that yoga seems like an excellent way for people who are overweight to get into the habit of exercising.

Sloucho has a confession to make: Contrary to his expectations, he thinks yoga is sort of cool.

And it's all thanks to this tape. Maybe it really will help you with your weight. But more importantly, it will turn you on to a form of exercise that I have found to be rather rewarding and enjoyable. I've overheard yoga instructors who have driven me crazy with their pseudo-philosophical prattle in gyms around the country. I remember playing basketball and having to listen to some guy in the next court lecture to a group of profoundly lost souls about how they should streeeetch, streeeetch, streeeetch and feel the power of all of the plants and animals that had ever lived coursing through their muscles. The guy I was playing with barked, "That's not the power of life, that's us dribbling a basketball." And I thought that even though his joke wasn't terribly funny, it was better than the drivel the tofu-muncher was spouting.

Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss does a nice job of not quite overcommitting to new age nonsense. In the first place, the four women performing the exercises are on a tiny mesa somewhere in the Southwest. The gorgeous desolation of the countryside is pleasing to look at and enables the narrator to get away with telling me to thrust the weight of my body through my extended right leg and into the earth.

I also have to admit that I sort of like the music on the tape. And I hate new agey music with a passion. The easiest way to drive me from a room is to play Paul Winter or the more recent stuff by Ottmar Liebert. As far as I can tell, new age music is for people who are too shallow to endure the silence of their own thoughts. They want inoffensive background noise that can distract them from their shallowness without being substantive enough to pose any real threat to that shallowness.

The music on Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss is as soothing as the viewer expects without being irritatingly innocuous.

Most importantly, the woman who narrates the tape (presumably Suzanne Deason) has a wise, warm, intelligent, and unpretentious voice. She makes claims that I can't help being a little skeptical about, e.g. "Exhaling while twisting the body in certain ways releases toxins that otherwise build up in certain organs and fester." Maybe that's true; maybe it's not. All I know is that I'm not buying it simply on the say-so of an extremely flexible and attractive woman.

At the same time, however, the fact that she's extremely flexible and attractive (and wise and warm and intelligent and unpretentious)--well, it don't exactly hurt her case, either.

There are four yogists that appear in Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss, each of whom does a slight modification on Deason's exercises. One does the modifications for those who are "tight in the hips, hamstrings or shoulders"; one for those who "are moderately flexible"; one for those who "want to build strength and stamina"; and Deason does the one for those who "are ready for a challenging workout." I skip from imitating one instructor to another, always imitating Deason when the positions are easy because it makes me feel all cool and stuff.

I'm actually looking forward to my yoga workout later this evening with Mrs. Sloucho. I can put up with being instructed to "soften my face" by someone who understands that she needs to give me some clue as to what such a command is supposed to mean.

Oh, and just in case any of you are thinking that Mrs. Sloucho won this one, allow me to point out that even if I am doing yoga, I got out of the class. The last day for signing up was a week and a half ago. Sometimes your catch-22 doesn't have to be fool-proof. Sometimes you're only looking to stall.


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