My Wife and I Have Added a Third During Quarantine
My wife and I love our space. In fact, us being apart a lot keeps us together. I’m a touring comedian, and she represents comedians as a manager, so we’re often in different parts of the country at the same time. And we love it, so now….you know. Even the closest couples are going crazy these days while isolated together, but Kara and I are at each other’s necks. Yesterday I heard her say over the phone, “I love Matt, I do, but lately sometimes I want to kill him.” I didn’t take any offence. In fact, her honestly was refreshing, like a snow cone on a hot day.
We’ve been doing well so far. We take walks, FaceTime with our respective parents a couple times a week, and even plan nice dinners for Fridays and Saturdays. Nightly ice creams also help. Plus, we stay busy. My wife is working all day from home and I’m developing a pitch, as well as online content and stand-up jokes (you know, in case stand-up returns someday). To generate money for people in need from Covid, I’ve started a weekly zoom happy hour show with my friend Kyle Kinane every Friday at 5:00. While this is going on, my wife has Zoom drinks in the next room with friends. All of this went on for two weeks, but it wasn’t enough.
Turns out, we needed a third.
We needed sweet Ryan.
My wife and I are pretty active, and one of the hardest things for us was giving up workout classes, especially spin and Zumba. Yeah, that’s right, I goddamn love Zumba. You sweat your balls off and it’s fun as hell. We’ve done a lot of classes via streaming the past few weeks, but none of them were all that fun. That’s when we found out that Ryan Heffington, owner of the Sweat Shop in nearby Silverlake, was hosting ‘pay what you want’ dance classes on IG Live. Now, if you don’t know Ryan, you’ve also never met a unicorn who is also a man. Put it this way, I love my therapist Allen, but he can’t hold a candle to how Ryan makes us feel. Dancing around his place barefoot, he gets everybody to not only stretch well, sweat well, and cardio up, he makes it feel like a party. The hour flies by, and he breaks up the choreography with really, really silly stuff.
We need silly now. We need silly real bad.
Some of my favorite Ryan go-to moves:
- Pretty Pony! He tells everybody to dance around like a pony. It’s stupid, but right now stupid feels fucking good.
2. Grab a Prop! You stop dancing and pick up something to use as a microphone. Last time he grabbed a giant tube of red lipstick that I think (I hope) was also a thermos.
3. Heavy Diaper! Code for doing deep squats. Simple. You understand before he demonstrates.
4. Booty Break! Twerk on something. For my wife and me, it’s an ass fight.
5. Dance Party! You stop what you’re doing and just dance around the room. we use the opportunity to go all over the living room, dining room, and even the kitchen. She’ll push off me, usually, which is understandable as I’m huge.
Pro tip: Throw your phone screen up on your TV screen if you can. It’s called mirroring. I never knew that was a thing before all this.
It’s escapist, healthy, and there’s even some delicious hate watching thrown in. Not for Ryan, for some of the comments. Most of them say things like, “I love you,” “Slay,” “Let’s go,” etc., but some are what you might expect. People who ask for information (“When’s the next one?” Look it up, dickhead) or who make it about themselves. Last time we did it, somebody wrote, “I love to dance but my stomach hurts from last night. If I dance I’ll barf.”
My wife said, “Fuck off, who cares?” and I high-fived her.
Thanks, Ryan. We love you.
