Sweatin' with the Doublewides

This one’s from the VHS years, when we thought spandex and Gatorade could save our souls.

October 11, 2025

The summer is over, and here I am counting my blessings, my calories, and my chins. All in all, it’s been a very good year for me and Little Debbie. I consumed many of them.

I realized this at a recent PTA meeting. The room was quiet; it was my turn to speak. As I headed toward the microphone, a wild burst of applause followed me. And it would have been a heady experience—had it not been my thighs clapping as I walked.

That was the moment I was forced to face an unpleasant truth: all my dreams of having my thighs lipo-sucked were dying with the Affordable Care Act. Drastic measures were called for. I must exercise. Back then, exercise meant sweating in front of a TV. Now it means paying $149 a month for someone named Skylar to shout “You got this!” over a playlist called “Grit and Glow!” Poor folks like me still get our cardio dodging overdraft fees.

I didn’t want to attempt this daunting task alone because I feared I might collapse and no one would check my stiff, prone body sprawled on the couch for a pulse. At least not until they ran out of clean underwear.

So, I cajoled some of my women friends, known collectively in the trailer park as the “Doublewides,” to join me in my quest for perfection. That’s what we called ourselves, back when I lived in that trailer and paid bills with coins I fished from the couch cushions. We couldn’t afford a gym membership, but we do have a folding chair, a wading pool, and a dream. And that’s basically CrossFit—just without the cult or the cute leggings. (And yes, we’re really doing this with old VCR tapes—dug ’em out from under a nest of cords and a dusty VHS of Steel Magnolias. The picture’s fuzzy, the sound cuts out, but bless it, the spirit’s still willing.)

We decided to begin with an oldie but a goodie—Cindy Crawford’s Shape Your Body. Perfection personified.

Before starting Cindy’s tape, a scavenger hunt was necessary to find all the props. I had the high-backed kitchen chairs, so we scratched them off the list. But we thought this was pretty goofy. After all, the typical woman isn’t going to lug kitchen chairs to the beach. She’s going to haul the refrigerator.

We didn’t have a sexy little French guy to count for us, but we did have Porky, the leering trailer park maintenance man, who was only too willing to donate his time to our bodies.

For the ocean, we used my daughter’s blow-up wading pool. Porky, proudly sporting his “Wonderbriefs,” splashed in the pool to simulate the sound of crashing waves.

Day One: Cindy Crawford

We were pumped. We were psyched. We were gonna look like Cindy Crawford by the end of the day.

We were wrong.

We popped in the tape. Cindy, looking all perky and pouty, long and lean, boobs spilling over her bathing suit, hair tousled like she’d had a good lay, began to guide us through our metamorphosis.

We wanted that look. Hell, we wanted that lay.

About fifteen seconds into it, however, we had our first casualty. Stacy, mumbling something about this conflicting with her pure Baptist upbringing, retired to the La-Z-Boy with a Little Debbie and commenced to coach us through the tape. “That’s not the way Cindy’s doing it, Carol,” she observed, around a mouthful of Swiss Rolls.

Things were rocking along smoothly until Cindy moved to the rooftop. Wanting to experience the full essence of the workout, we strapped our chairs to our backs and scaled the trailer.

Bertha, weighing somewhere in the neighborhood of, well, our neighborhood, had a difficult time. She would have crashed completely through my ceiling had her bottom not been too wide for the hole she created.

She dangled there in suspended animation. This was good, she informed us; her joints didn’t hurt. A low-impact workout if you didn’t count the roof damage.

Cindy says it is very important to take lots of thirst breaks.

We complied and drank lots of Gatorade and a splash of vodka.

This added a whole dementia—er, dimension to our workout. To quote Martha Stewart, “This is a good thing”.

Day Two: Denise Austin

Dressing for fat-burning success, I donned my purple workout clothes and was mistaken for Barney by my two-year-old grandson.

Bertha squeezed into her leotard—more spandex than a Mary Kay convention—pushing everything dangerously upward. Like Cindy Crawford, Bertha’s hearty bosom spilled over the top of her leotard, which was even more impressive since it was a turtleneck.

She looked like she had the mumps. Or a really bad glandular condition.

We chose the Non-Aerobic Workout because we were particularly attracted to the non-aerobic portion of this tape.

“Inhale. Lift. Up, up. Through the rib cage. Stretch. Take it up. Tighten that tush. Squeeeeeezzzzze, release,” instructed Austin, the pesky little cheerleader from hell.

Even when I tightened my buns, lifting them as high as possible, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, oh so tightly, even then…my buttocks hung down so far that I could grip books between them and the backs of my thighs. Heck, I could stash a six-pack there. And have.

Too perky for our tastes, we quickly moved from Denise Austin in the living room to the Margarita Shuffle in the kitchen.

This provides great exercise for the wrists: blend, release. Blend, release. And the biceps: pour, drink up. Pour, drink up.

We highly recommend this exercise.

Day Three: Sweatin’ to the Oldies

Here was a tape for us. Good music, fun dancing, and women, like us, who subscribed to the Deal-a-Meal plan. If there were a meal, we’d deal with it.

We were dancing. We were jiving. We were jumping. We were sweatin’ (sorta) to the oldies.

Just then, we heard a rather ominous hissing sound emanating from beneath us. At first, we thought it was Bertha. Turned out to be the wheels on my home giving way beneath our weight.

But we kept up with Richard. Ponied when he ponied, shuffled when he shuffled. Did the Pharaoh, the Swim, the Monkey.

We tipped that trailer like a seesaw. My husband, who works the night shift, slept right through our workout, despite his being flipped like a flapjack each time we jumped. These days, everybody’s on Peloton pretending to be in a cult with better music. At least Richard Simmons made you feel loved.

Day Four: Line Dancing

We were gonna do Jane Fonda’s Workout but passed on accounta we heard she’s a Commie. So we decided to try Country Line Dancing instead.

Dressed in her Daisy Dukes, Wanda was excited about this one. She, after all, planned to use these moves to get herself a man next time she went to the Rendezvous Lounge.

Stacy, whose husband is our preacher, objected vehemently to using this tape because dancing is a sin.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Wanda admonished. “Did we learn nothing from ‘Footloose’?”

The Achy-Breaky, we discovered, is less a dance move than a condition after a big girl steps on your foot.

The Tush Push was no easier and, I think, possibly illegal in our county.

Day Five: Susan Powter

Again, we had to go on a scavenger hunt. Tall chair? Check. Step? We’ll use our Igloo beer coolers.

Weights? The one thing the Doublewides don’t have to go searching for is weights. We pack our own.

And usually store them in a Playtex Cross Your Heart Double-D bra. These things are so big that, during the ‘70s, when we’d dance, one shimmy could take out the whole disco.

“There are three things you must do,” Powter told us. “You must eat. You must breathe. And you must move.”

We’ve got the eating and breathing part down. And Lord knows I’ve done my share of moving–running from bill collectors.

“Look at this,” Powter tells us, as she holds up a picture of herself at 260 lbs.

Hell, that’s Bertha’s goal weight.

Powter starts simply enough. Like the Little Engine that Could, we think we can do this. We step-touch from side to side. We breathe. We step-touch. We breathe. We step-touch…

We collapse. In a heap. On the floor. Just beneath a gilt-framed portrait of Elvis.

And we look up through dehydrated eyes into his. And he looked at us.

And as I stared, looking up into those wise velvet eyes, a miracle happened. Just like one I’d seen on TV. A single teardrop fell from Elvis’s eye. And a halo appeared above his head—shaped like the Golden Arches.

And I will swear to my dying day that his lips moved, forming that single word which holds so much inspiration for me and the Doublewides…

McDonald’s.

© 2025 Carol Countryman. All rights reserved.
This piece is part of Psalm of Lies and the ongoing series Tales from East Texas.
Please share the link, not the text. Reprints, excerpts, or readings by permission only: carolcountryman@gmail.com.