Maar weer eens voor de inspiratie

[stynxie]

En nu iets uit de oude doos, 1930.
The Belle of the Barbell

Prachtig verhaal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/ma...=1&oref=slogin

Stukjes hieruit:

And in Santa Monica, sometime in the late 1930s, a young woman named Abbye Eville decided she’d put on too much weight in her job as a telephone operator and picked up the dumbbells that her boyfriend had brought her. Then she put them down. Then she picked them up again.
In real life, strength is not a rocket shot or exposure to a wizard or a spider bite: you’re not weak one moment and superheroic the next. It’s a decision you make daily. Abbye Eville kept lifting the dumbbells. The telephone-company weight dropped away; her childhood nickname, Pudgy, became a fond joke. Her muscles became visible and then impressive.
[snip]
In photographs of the Muscle Beach hand-balancers, you can find Pudgy as a top-mounter or under-stander, upside down and right side up, with two women on each arm and a man on her shoulders or alone in a handstand, muscular and pocket-size: 5 foot 1, 115 pounds. Make no mistake: She’s not toned or firmed-up or any of those timid terms that even 21st-century women persist in using when they decide to change their bodies through exercise. She’s built. Her back is corrugated with muscles as she supports a likewise muscular man — Les Stockton, now her husband, 185 pounds of bodybuilder — upside down over her head.
[snip]
What does musclebound mean, anyhow? It’s an insult dreamed up by the underdeveloped. Pudgy Stockton’s mission was to show women that muscles could only ever set them free.
[snip]
You can’t see all the work it has taken them to get to this bright beach, both of them looking like sculptures come to joyful life; you can’t tell who has kissed whom alive. They have lifted all those weights so they can lift each other. The wind pulls back Pudgy’s hair and makes her squint. She stands, blond and lovely, on the palms of her husband’s upraised hands while she presses a 100-pound barbell overhead. Then they switch places, and she supports him above her, hand to hand, she smiling up and he smiling down, as satisfactory a portrait of a marriage as ever could be.
[snip]

Prachtig, ontroerend en wat een vrouw!! En in die tijd.