Nostalgia: I'm Still Here for You, Buns of Steel 3

One writer contemplates a time when working out was a whole lot simpler.

By Annie Winn
Published: October 8th, 2010 | 11:00am

Just like all the cool-girl hellcats before them, the girls of the Buns of Steel videos always showed up in groups of three. Up front and center was Tamilee Webb, who had PTA bangs and a body that was so lyposuctioned all her organs and other gooey insides were popping out to say hello. Behind her were the typical heirs of the Hitlerian throne: the token black girl (Donna Richardson) and the smiling mute (Tracy York). Both girls had sweet, muppet-like voices and both were probably spending their evenings plotting Tamilee’s quick and traceless death. Maybe you were as well!

But this is a story about butts, not aerobics assassinations, so let’s leap to the part where Tamilee moons our great nation. Yes, Tamilee’s purple bethonged leotard didn't even cover a micron of her perfectly spherical, gravity-mocking hindquarters. I would have become jealous but I knew that in America, if you willed something hard enough and your moral code was loose enough, you could get it.

Perhaps someone could invent corset underwear that could lift and shrink my butt. With microchips! Or perhaps my butt could be surgically removed, so a plastered mold of Tamilee’s could be installed—which, at times, might feel like I was sitting on a piñata, but oh would it be worth it.

Instead, I decided to just do Buns of Steel 3: Buns & More every day after I came home from school. I must admit I still feel a dash sentimental about it all. The video was filmed at a time when it was still acceptable for girls to be terminally peppy while exercising. The threesome was forced to smile throughout the entire workout, reversing the order of the human mind and spirit. Smile while you are having an asthma attack! Smile when your arm has been dislocated from its socket! Even more troubling was the dialogue, which seemed to have been written by the board of directors of PBS over a teleconference call. “It doesn’t matter how you look or how you move,” Donna would assure us, un-ironically. “Just have fun!”

Embarrassingly, the video’s eerie happiness rubbed off on me. I began doing the workouts in my old purple gymnastics leotard (just like Tamilee's!) and I even occasionally belted out a few of Donna’s absurd exercise noises like “Whoo!” or “Whee!” Whenever my mother would fall witness to this, she would flash me one of those regretful final last looks a parent gives their child before giving him or her up for adoption. She didn’t, though—don't worry.

When I left for college a few months later, I was lost among kids who were all a notch more sophisticated than the ones back at home. They were always talking about their yoga classes, their pilates classes, their yogalates classes, and their yoga decaf late meditation kabala Mahatma Gandhi classes! Girls wouldn’t leave their dorms without a mat jabbing out from under their arms, beheading me as I walked by.

I eventually decided to attend a yogalates class to find out what all the hoopla was about. The classes were held in a dance studio in the student gym and everything about the place seemed rather dreary. The instructor, Mona, was dressed in mourning colors and told us in a brainwashing voice to “notice the breath coming into the body” and to “open our legs like a fan” and to “wrap our feet around our neck like a scarf.” In other words, don’t exercise at all. Whenever Mona told us to “listen” to our bodies, all I could really hear was a vat of my own cellulite sitting idly in its own filth. I needed more action.

When I returned to my dorm room after class, I turned on my Buns of Steel video, hoping for the comforts of my old workout. It worked. Just like old times, I could feel my mouth collecting saliva, and my endorphins running around my head as freely as children. I appreciated that Tamilee was rooting me on: “C’MON!!!!!! REALLY MOVE IT ON THE DOUBLE!!” I decided correctly this was the only workout routine I could feel passionately about ever again.

Exercise just felt more right, it seemed, when you felt like the leotarded star of an Olivia Newton John “Let’s Get Physical” reenactment tour.