For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a “lifestyle” magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and ChikLixPR. My relationship with the magazine ended before the magazine itself died a lingering death, but I’m not telling the PR people that. Their emails, pitching me stories about complicated kitchenwares, advanced mindfulness techniques, or a rare yak-skin cowling custom-designed for one of my private planes, are by far the most interesting communications anyone ever sends me.
“Hi, Andrew!” the flack will write. They are so chipper, these people. “Hope this finds you well! Just circling back on my earlier note about the most innovative . . .” There’s poignancy to the arrangement: a young person being paid to force herself to implausible levels of enthusiasm so she can exploit my nonexistent affiliation with a magazine that died years ago in order to get me to write an article I have no intention of writing about a subject I’m not particularly interested in or qualified to write about. Can you think of a better summary of modern journalism?
Once in a while, though, a flack will hit the sweet spot of this onetime lifestyle writer to the ridiculously rich. The other day an email plopped into my inbox with the subject line “Ten Easy Tricks to Improve Your Posture in 2017.” My heart leapt. I thought, “At last!”
This was news I could use. I have terrible posture. I know this because many people, beginning with my parents and continuing through several grade-school teachers, the family doctor, two Little League coaches, a professional sadist posing as a high school gym teacher, on up to my first, second, and third girlfriends, have told me I have terrible posture. It’s fair to say there’s a consensus. I once caught my college roommate entertaining some friends with an impression of my stooped and lumbering gait. We were all drunk, but he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. He moved like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.
The most insufferable of those old girlfriends once offered a psychological explanation for my bad posture: A certain kind of tall person deemphasizes his height by drooping his shoulders and bending slightly at the clavicle to keep from standing out in a crowd. Thus, she said, the paradoxical effect of being tall, supposedly a boost to the male ego, is that a certain kind of tall person ends up shlumping around like a Poindexter. You can see why we broke up.
I thought her explanation was baloney until I spent time with Jeb Bush. He is taller than I and hence his posture is worse; although he easily clears 6’3″, he always walks as if he’s ducking through the door of Bilbo Baggins’s kitchen. Combine the bad posture with low energy and you’ve got a failed presidential candidate on your hands. If you want people to think you’re presidential timber, it helps to look like timber.
The Ten Easy Tricks that will de-Bush my posture in 2017 come courtesy of an “exercise physiologist” called Alice Ann Dailey. As I read through them, however, my leaping heart fell.
Tip one: “Walk with knees pointing forward.” I never thought my knees pointed anywhere. Tip two was “Point toes . . . forward.” Where else would they point? I gave it a try while walking my dog, carefully aligning my knees with my toes, in a forward-pointing half-goose step. This had the effect of reducing my walking speed to much less than .01 mph, while causing my legs to stiffen as I walked, and also causing my neighbor to stare at me through his window. Marty Feldman transmutes into Robbie the Robot.
As the tips piled up my body became more entangled with itself. “Carry pelvis with tailbone pointing down toward the heels of your feet.” This made for an unpleasant word picture but I did as I was told. Then I had to point my elbows outward, point my chin downward, and point the back of my ears upward—all while carrying my pelvis. “Supermodels do this,” enthused Alice Ann Dailey, “and so can you!” Robbie the Robot transmutes into Kate Moss. Or not.
I abstracted all these instructions into a geometrical pattern. If I were finally to achieve good posture I would have to envision a theoretical line extending from the back of my ears to my chin, then further downward, sending tangents off to my elbows, intersecting again where my tailbone pointed heelward, down through my forward-pointing knees to my forward-pointing toes.
I tripped over the dog and gave up. It is possible that good posture is simply beyond my ability. I never wanted to be president anyway.
