So I said that I hadn't seen the guy and we continued taking about how he had come to be able to do it. Was he a dancer? Maybe. What kind of exercises was he doing? We speculated. Our talking was interrupted by the re-entrance of the guy in question to the sauna. He sat in the corner opposite me, with all of us companionably silent now, and after a time he started to stretch again.

At first they were simple stretches. He folded up to stretch his back--first over one leg, then the other. Next he did a kind of figure-eight shoulder rotation, followed by some neck stretching that culminated in a loose, controlled roll of his head through 360 degrees clockwise, then 360 counterclockwise. He knelt then, and folded himself into a fetal ball--the Hatha yoga "pose of the child." Then he sat, splayed his legs, and touched his chest to the floor, repeating it several times, each time with his legs slightly wider. At the end, he was in a near perfect split. The insides of my thighs ached in sympathy. Wherever my own training goes, I may never master a split. Shortly after, he left the sauna.

Throughout this performance I studied him and his form. He was handsome, blondish, very lean and in the early stages of male pattern baldness. Excepting the muscles of his legs he had little developed definition. His muscles were long and they radiated flexibility even in repose. He did not have a professional dancer's torso. I knew that without thinking, but I had to think to know why I knew it. Ultimately it was leanness. Ballet dancers are not fat, but the need for strength to carry off a lift gives them an upper body solidness that this guy didn't have. Watching him stretch I was trying to guess where he had learned to practice those stretches. Perhaps some kind of non-professional dance? Yoga? Jogging?

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