hanging like a ragdoll

Perhaps you've been wondering. Perhaps not. Perhaps the time has come for me to tell you.

This summer I worked at a remote field station on the north slope of Alaska. We didn't have showers, but we did have a private yoga instructor, Mr. Allen Finger. All we had to do was pop him in the VCR, scrape the mud and popcorn from the floor, and an hour of post mosquito-bogged fieldwork, pre data entry, nirvana was ours. By the end of the summer I was classically conditioned, like a dog salivating after a bell, to instantly relax at the sound of Allen's terrifically faked Indo-Afro-Austro-accent. In one of the poses Allen would have us stand, feet hips distance apart, folded over at the hips like a jacknife, arms crossed holding opposite elbows. With R's rolling and voice inflecting wildly he would grandly state "This posture is called 'the ragdoll,' because you are hanging like a ragdoll."

And that, my friends, is the rest of the story.