Lavinia Plonka | thesofiamagazine

The Persistence of . . . Uh . . . I Forget

by Lavinia Plonka | Feb 28, 2020 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method, Uncategorized

By Lavinia Plonka

Salvador Dali’s unforgettable image of watches dripping off branches has been a favorite of mine since I was a child. Time can melt, but never disappear, like the memory of an event. Except of course, it’s not true. Memory itself melts, distorts and recreates itself with a logic that defies science.

My husband Ron has no memory at all when it comes to social plans. I rack my brain trying to understand what trauma he had in his childhood that would make him incapable of remembering that we have tickets for the theater, that we’ve had the tickets for six weeks, that he loves this play and was the one who said he wanted to go. I’ll hear him on the phone, planning to get together with someone for the night we have the tickets. I try to get his attention. He hates when I try to talk to him while he’s on the phone. Never mind that he tries to talk to me while I’m on the phone, that’s another rant.
He’ll say to his friend, “Hold on a second Jeff. My wife is jumping up and down with something that can’t wait.”

“You can’t meet Jeff tomorrow, we have tickets for the theater.”
“What theater?”

“Um, Hamlet? Remember?”

“Yeah, I know the play.”

“No! They’re doing Hamlet downtown, we have tickets for tomorrow!”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you!? You picked up the tickets!”

“I did? I did! But that was weeks ago.”

“Right. But we haven’t gone to the show yet, didn’t you notice?”

“Of course I know we haven’t.” There is an uncertain pause. “Damn, I’ve seen so many productions of Hamlet. I wouldn’t know if I went or not. You have to write these dates on the calendar.”

I mutely point to the calendar, which is right in front of him, where I have written, HAMLET.

He uncovers the phone. “Uh, yeah, Jeff, we can’t do it tomorrow. It seems we have theater tickets . . . ”

I used to pride myself on my impeccable memory. My family called me “ST”, for Steel Trap. Why look something up when you could just call Lavinia for obscure song lyrics or a forgotten recipe? Until recently, it seemed to me that women in general are better able to hold details like whose turn it is to do the dishes, or when was the last time you took a toilet bowl brush in your hand, with greater precision than the male mind. Ron’s memory seemed sharpest when reminiscing about his youthful exploits. We can go to a party where he will have a delightful conversation with someone we’ve met several times, and then later that evening, when recalling the conversation, he can’t remember the person’s name. Yet the other day, an envelope appeared in our mailbox with an unfamiliar name. Ron came home and I called out to him, “You got a letter from someone I never heard of. From Ohio. Some guy named Robert Morris.”

“Ah,” says Ron, without even a pause. “My lifeguarding buddy at Cheesequake State Park back in ’62.” Then he spends a half hour trying to remember where he put his reading glasses, which are hanging around his neck.

Then it happened to me. I ignored some of the first moments I was caught. Not showing up for a lunch date because I forgot to look at my book. Forgetting my brother-in-law’s birthday. And then the shortest short term memory loss event in history: I misplaced my red clippers while I was using them. I had them. I put them down, got some Hollytone to sprinkle around the azaleas. I went back to pick them up. They were gone. I searched the area. Under the bushes. In the wheelbarrow. I went into the house in case I had gone in for something, (had I gone in for something? I couldn’t remember). I even looked in my car in case, in a moment of complete sleep I thought the clippers needed a ride. I decided to blame aliens. They had abducted my clippers. They were collecting earth items for an art show in space. Some day, they would dump all the stuff they had stolen on someone’s house in Iowa. I just knew it.

The other night, Ron and I went to a concert. In all the excitement of actually arriving early enough to have a glass of wine in the lobby (an essay on downsizing life’s thrills is forthcoming), Ron forgot his shoulder bag on the floor. Once seated in the theater, he suddenly realized what he had done and bolted out to retrieve it. While he was gone, the women in the row behind us began to talk.

“I have totally lost my short term memory.”

“I know, isn’t it awful?”

“One of the worst things is when you see an old movie and suddenly you realize, ‘wait, I’ve seen this before!”

“Sometimes I see the whole movie and don’t remember any of it from before!”

“You know what’s really bad. It’s when you actually rent a movie, bring it home, and then realize that you’ve seen it before. Has that ever happened to you?

Long pause, then, “I don’t know.”

We recently had a beautiful new patio built of concrete interlocking bricks. We were so proud, like parents of a new child, standing arm in arm, admiring our new patio. The next morning, the patio was riddled with tiny volcanoes as armies of ants tunneled their way through the joints to create their little condos in the brick foundation we had so thoughtfully provided for them. Ron became obsessed, starting with hot water, proceeding to boric acid, and then Windex. I came home one day to find him with a hypodermic syringe, on his hands and knees, injecting something into the seams of the bricks.

“What are you injecting?”

Silence. He looks up. “Someone told me they hate pee.”

“You’re injecting pee into the holes? How did you get the pee into the syringe? Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

When the pee didn’t work (plus, I really didn’t enjoy the odor, although the ants liked it fine), someone suggested grits. “OK, I’ll pick up the grits after work,” I grunted.

When I got home, Ron asked for the grits. I had forgotten to pick up the grits. “Hallelujah!” he cried. “I’m not the only one who forgets!”

The next day, he called me from the market. “Yellow grits? Instant grits? Quick grits? Grits with cheddar and bacon? Cheese flavored grits?” We settled on yellow.

“Oh, by the way, while you’re there,” I say, “Could you pick up some Epsom salts?”

“Sure.”

That night, I ask for the Epsom salts. He looks up at me blankly. Smiles. “I forgot.”

“How could you forget, I talked to you in the store!”

He shrugs. “That’s how it happens. You just forget.”

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Physics of Love

by Lavinia Plonka | Jan 31, 2020 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

This morning, my husband Ron, obviously possessed, decided to make a stab at some of yesterday’s dirty dishes. He got as far as a wooden bowl. He picked up the obviously Asian, delicately painted bowl gingerly. His expression was reminiscent of someone who, on a casual walk through woods, stumbles upon an alien’s ray gun. Now this bowl was given to us almost five years ago, one of two with matching chopsticks, by a houseguest. Ron looks at me, holding the bowl, “Where does this go?”

I stare at him. “What?” is my incredulous reply. I heard him. Of course I heard him. And I could simply say, “It goes on the display shelf next to its mate.” But I don’t. Sadist? Masochist? You be the judge.

He’s now intently contemplating the chopsticks. He now knows, just from the timbre and nuance of my, “What?” that he’s supposed to remember this bowl. He’s supposed to know its history, its place in the house. He knows that his question has triggered Irate Condescending Female Syndrome. His mind is feverishly trying to decide whether to surrender, or attempt to rescue himself. He digs himself deeper. “These chopsticks. They match the bowl, don’t they?” I can barely contain myself. “Yes, dear, they are a set.” He ponders the little notch and hole, cleverly placed there by some underpaid laborer so that the chopsticks rest neatly on the bowl. After a couple of minutes of fiddling, he has them together. He glances, slightly desperately, around the kitchen. He does not want to ask me again, so he opens the cabinet where we keep bowls and starts to quietly put the bowl with the chopsticks in.

“Not there!” I sputter, appalled at the resemblance of my voice to Daffy Duck’s. He jumps back.

“I know!” he protests. “I was uh, I was just rearranging the shelf in there, see?” He pulls out an ancient salad bowl, given to us as part of a set for our wedding forty one years ago. “I would never put this lovely, delicate, painted bowl in with these cracked, old things.”

Now I have to prioritize my ire – how dare he call those lovingly oiled cherished walnut bowls cracked old things? But that would distract me from the more immediate game – the “you never remember anything game.” So I let go of the righteous indignation and zero in for the kill. “Well now, I think that bowl goes with the other bowl. Remember, we got two?”

His eyes panic. “Two bowls? Of course, we have two bowls.” He is now whirling around the kitchen, bowl in hand, opening cabinets.

I stop him and lead him to the display shelves, placing the bowl next to its brother. “That’s where they’ve been. Remember? We decided they were too beautiful to hide away?”

He stares at them. “Display. They’re display items. Why would I think of getting food bowls from a display shelf?” Somehow we have staggered and flailed together for years of riotous adventures, several teetering brinks and countless arguments over how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Our atomic dance of positive, negative, yes and no, right and wrong, I did, you did not, has kept us spinning in complex patterns that would make John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Live dizzy. Friends often ask me how, in this age of broken marriages, Ron and I have managed to stay happily together. I sort of vaguely remember principles from physics that had to do with attraction, covalent bonds (or was that chemistry). My guess is that Ron’s and my cha cha through time, if shrunk to subatomic size would resemble exactly the atomic behavior of a bedroom slipper. Something cozy and familiar. An object that finds its way into unexpected places. (“Have you seen my bedroom slipper?” “Hey, how did this slipper get in the stove?”) But of course I have no way of proving that our relationship is a macrocosm of a slipper, so I concentrate on continuing to perfect my dance, and keep our relationship as cozy and unpredictable as I can.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in trying to share my life with a human of the male persuasion. This is a very unscientific report, based on research with one subject. For a more exhaustive study on the vast gulf between male and female, don’t stop at books like Men are From Mars. There’s a vast literature written by professionals who are eager to help confuse us further with titles like: Why Men Don’t Have A Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes (Barbara and Allan Pease) or 9 Secrets to Bedroom Bliss: Exploring Sexual Archetypes to Reveal Your Lover’s Passions, and Discover What Turns You On (by not one, but two PHDs – James Herriot and Oona Mourier) Books are wonderful, but experience is a marvelous teacher if you just recognize the lesson.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, I saw a movie a while ago about a family that was so ordinary they were extraordinary. The husband so loved his wife’s cooking that no matter what she served he said, “My god! This is delicious! What is it?”

“Ice cream.”

“How’d you make it?”

“I bought it at the grocery store.”

“Brilliant!”

Ron does that. I can make a tuna melt and he dives in with such joy, you’d think it was chateaubriand.

Separate vacations. Nothing makes a man appreciate his wife more than sleeping on sheets he keeps forgetting to change for more than a week. Not to mention the fact that he’s lived on peanut butter and pizza all week.

Which brings me to: Let them eat pizza. I used to try to provide for Ron’s meals when I traveled. Once I tried to be the perfect housewife by making and labeling meals. When I returned, the refrigerator was full of science projects and there was a pile of pizza boxes in the recycling. “Why didn’t you eat the food in the refrigerator?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find anything,” was his reply. A friend of ours calls this MLD: Male Looking Disorder. “If it’s not a beer bottle, we can’t recognize it,” he explained. I’ve decided that Ron just needs to go back to his roots periodically: pizza, peanut butter, turkey sandwiches. Then when I return, he is ready for risotto.

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is: nagging gets you nowhere. We’re talking chromosomes here. There is undoubtedly a genetic predisposition to deafness when the line, “When are you going to….” is repeated. Here is my secret weapon: start doing whatever it is you wanted your husband to do. Loudly. Need a picture on the wall? Start with “Honey, I need your hammer and the picture hanger hooky things.” Want a table refinished? “So . . . I bought this highly toxic furniture stripper stuff and I’m going to re-do the table on the living room carpet.” Need new track lighting? “Hey, honey, I’ve got this light panel open and I’m wondering about these loose wires hanging out of the wall?” They can’t stand it. You will get instant results, guaranteed.

Like any partner dance, there is one important rule: pay attention. Try not to step on each other’s toes. Remember that his moves mirror your own. Somewhere in the dance between negative and positive, electron and proton, yes and no, there is a nucleus, a center, and that is called love.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Embracing Change

by Lavinia Plonka | Dec 31, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method, Psychic

By Lavinia Plonka

One of my oddest, odd jobs was a mini-career in reading Tarot cards at parties as Madame Lavinia. It had begun by accident: a theatrical agent who knew that I dabbled, called me in hysterics: their psychic was sick (couldn’t she have predicted that?). Could I, would I throw together a gypsy costume and read cards? “I can’t do that! I’m not psychic!” But no excuse would deter her from her conviction that a phony seeress was better than none. I sat at this party feeling like a cross between a con artist and a blithering idiot.

“You’re going through some big changes at the moment,”

“Things have been tough, but it’s all going to change,”

“You need a change.”

Whenever I was at a loss as to how to interpret the cards, I just had to couch my oracular pronouncements from the perspective of change and I was on a par with the Delphic Pythoness. Somehow, word got around and next thing I knew, (although I should have seen it in the cards), Madame Lavinia was booked for events ranging from corporate picnics to graduation parties.

In the past, during particularly dreary days, I’d pull out the cards and say to myself, “Yes, things are pretty bleak right now, but they are about to change.” Then I’d lay out the cards. When the spread dared to intimate more of the same misery, I would quickly gather them up, saying, “Clearly I haven’t shuffled enough. Give me something better than that . . . now!”

I’ve been told more than once that “all is good.” That it’s all about attitude. Looked at from another perspective, we could reframe things: bad is the new good! For example, there’s a Tarot card called the Tower. It shows screaming people leaping out of a burning castle or skyscraper. Instead of saying, “Uh oh, there’s a catastrophic change ahead,” look at the good: “You are about to experience a magnificent opportunity to liberate yourself from old attachments.” One of my favorite doom and gloom cards is the Ten of Swords. A person lies face down, stabbed in the back by ten swords. The Tarot historically defines this as ruin, betrayal, utter despair. What a wonderful time to treat yourself to a massage! Better yet, let’s look at the therapeutic quality of being punctured. Maybe a few sessions of acupuncture are in your future.

All the great philosophies tell us that change is inevitable. The I Ching is actually called The Book of Changes. Just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do. When you’ve been knocked up side the head by the Ten of Swords, be comforted that even this can be interpreted positively: there’s no place to go but up!

If I don’t drink my opened bottle of wine, it will turn into vinegar. On the other hand, if I forget about the apple cider in the fridge, it becomes hard cider. See? Change is good. When do you let change happen and when do you initiate change? Is my decision – whether it’s a fashion fit before a party or quitting my job – really mine?

Everything is always changing, even when we don’t notice it. I imagine a conversation between two rocks sitting on the bank of a river.

“Hey.” “Hey what.”

“I’m eroding.”

“I’ve noticed you’re looking thinner. You look great!”

“I dunno. I could probably still lose a bit on the bottom.”

“Well, you better be careful. Try to change too much and you’ll do something radical. Did you see
what Al did?

“How could you miss it? He went right over the edge of the bank.”

“Well, he’s been on the edge for a long time. I warned him.”

“Yeah, but to just go like that.”

“Crazy, huh.”

“Hey, he’ll survive, he likes to take chances. Anyways, let’s face it, you never know when change is going to hit you. Look at Ilsa, man.”

“I know, she totally cracked!”

“Who would have expected Ilsa to fall apart like that. She was such a rock!”

“It’s always the quiet ones.”

“And now she’s in pieces. I don’t think she’s going to be able to get herself back together.”

“Well, she was no spring chicken.”

“Yeah. We got time.”

When we decided to leave NJ for Asheville, I felt reborn. I ran up and down stairs, packing boxes, organizing yard sales, giving things away. I couldn’t wait to start over. No one in Asheville would know I’d ever been a fortune teller. I would have no past, except what I was willing to divulge.

While I packed, my husband Ron would slip out of the house in the morning and return in the evening without so much as touching a box. I assumed he was busy packing up his studio. But he wasn’t. He was sitting there, paralyzed. A week before the move, I asked him how it was going and Ron assured me he was almost done. When the movers arrived at his studio, they not only had to finish packing his stuff, but they had to order another truck because Ron’s “few boxes” amounted to another whole move.

After everything was gone; the house was empty, the studio was empty, the new family was waiting outside, Ron stood rooted in the house. I asked him if he was scared.

“No, why?”

“Because you’re standing stock still in the middle of our former house.”

“Huh?”

“It’s time to go now. We’re moving to Asheville.”

“Right, right.”

To this day we, or rather I, joke that Ron’s heels left skid marks on the floor in our old home as I dragged him to his new life. He doesn’t think it’s funny

Life is good. I decide, why not read my Tarot cards? They come up – two of disks: change, five of cups: disappointment, The Moon: fear of the unknown. I quickly gather them up and say, “Clearly I haven’t shuffled enough!”

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldekrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Heeding The Call

by Lavinia Plonka | Dec 3, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

A few days ago, a word popped into my head. Dithyramb. From nowhere. No NPR story. No romance novel. No scholarly treatise in recent memory had included that word. In fact, I had no idea what it meant, although at my age, that could simply mean I don’t remember. I shrugged and went on with my day. And then, every day, there it was, dithyramb. Like an earworm, you know, a song that goes on and on in your head and you can’t get rid of it. I recently battled Frank Sinatra’s anthem, “That’s Life” for a few days, thought I had conquered it, only to have my husband Ron sing it to me after the overloaded food processor spewed pureed beets all over my white linen shirt.

“Dithyramb,” said my brain as I dug up my bumper crop of Jerusalem artichoke. (Did you know Jerusalem artichokes are good for your gut bacteria? What to do with ten pounds of inulin rich tubers?) “Dithyramb,” it whispered as I attempted parallel parking on Haywood Rd. during rush hour. The multiple folds of my gray matter vibrated and echoed. Of course, lots of other words and ideas pop into our heads on a regular basis, like old songs, names of people I went to high school with, lists of various types of heirloom string beans. But they are polite, perhaps arriving unbidden, but leaving gracefully.

I could have just looked it up. But you know how it is. Like the friend you keep remembering you were supposed to call, except it’s 11PM, or you’re in the shower, or you misplaced your cell phone. And then you forget. So I would muse as I drove, or piloted my shopping cart through Trader Joe’s. Was it some kind of ancient Greek musical instrument? Maybe a tool for divination? A mathematical term? Forget the why, at this point it was all about the what.

Finally I looked it up, slightly apprehensive that it might not even be a word. Or that it might be some inappropriate type of sex toy. Perhaps it was a word from another reality, another dimension,
and had no meaning here at all. But there it was. Dithyramb.

• A wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, especially one dedicated to Dionysus.

• A passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing.

While I’ve done some wild dancing in my time, often influenced by the gifts of Dionysus, I have definitely never sung a wild choral hymn. Passionate or inflated speech however is another story. I have spent a good deal of my life either being told to shut up, or telling myself to button it. I even spent 25 years as a mime, perhaps because while expressing my passion usually ended up with my foot firmly in my mouth, the crafting of a mime piece actually required reasoned thought, choreography, and practice.

I worried that heeding the call of Dithyramb was the first symptom of “voices in my head.” What was my brain going to tell me next? And would it be Dithyrambic? “Go, Lavinia, stand in Pack Place and declaim your passion for the construction of a monorail above Merrimon Avenue!” “You must now invent a new recipe combining lichen and wild persimmon!” “This is the time to pull out those fishnet stockings from your 80’s punk period! Seize the moment!” Can you shut off your brain? Do Zen practitioners have dithyrambic interventions?

Every day, scientists are finding more stuff out about how our brains work. There is the brain’s glymphatic system flushing our brains every night. Glial cells, originally thought to be just “stuff” in our heads turn out to be key players in our neuronal health. They’ve even found the part of the brain responsible for earworms and that earworms can boost our mood, if they don’t drive us crazy.

What if the call to Dithyramb was some higher force trying to communicate with me, that I need to tune into some yet unidentified passion? How can I lean in, listen more deeply for what the ether is trying to tell me? Or perhaps it’s simply that in my past life I was one of the mythical Eleusinian mimes (OK, a mime for all time!) who apparently were instrumental in these dithyrambic revels. For sure it’s a word that needs to re-enter our lexicon.
We need more wild choral hymns, more passionate speeches. Dionysus is calling.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

Board Games

by Lavinia Plonka | Oct 31, 2019 | Asheville, Body Language, Feldenkrais Method

By Lavinia Plonka

“I think we should….”

“Forget it, we don’t have the money.”

“What about….”

“There’s no budget for that.”

“We need….”

“Yeah, but our financials are so bad, the members will never go for it.”

“I’d like to propose…”

“Go ahead. The complainers will eat you alive.”

Didn’t we, why haven’t we, money, naysayers, money, no volunteers, money, money, money. No wonder we call it a non-profit!

I sit at the board meeting, squirming, checking my Facebook page, pacing the room, staring out the window, even at one point lying down on the floor, feeling like Steve McQueen as a prisoner in Papillon. Nothing helps me endure the chains of minutiae that hang on our organization. If we really wanted to torture political prisoners we could simply put them on a non-profit’s board of directors.

Many years ago, before it was a status event, I went to Burning Man. It is located on a desert playa, a specific terrain that transforms radically in the event of a rare and sudden rain. As the rain came pouring down, the soil was transformed from a hard packed gray surface to a bizarre kind of clay that attached itself to the bottom of our shoes. With every step another layer of clay attached itself, so that even if you ran, within seconds you were wearing cement platform shoes. You could no longer lift your feet and you had to stop in spite of the pouring rain to knock the clay platforms off your shoes and run again, repeating the process until you were soaked, covered in gray muck, and exhausted. The difference between this and being on the board of a non-profit is that eventually the rain did stop.

I had taken to calling the board meetings “bored” meetings. The endless questions about the lost revenue, the harried executive director constantly explaining why something ended up costing more, and the eternal discussions about policy filled me with futility. How could we possibly innovate, change, improve anything if we were trapped in an endless loop of protocol? The final straw was when a typo was found in one of the by-laws.

The By-law is up on the screen as part of a Powerpoint presentation. (When Steve Jobs went to meetings, if someone began a Powerpoint presentation, he walked out.) I’m like the mime in the box, helplessly banging on the invisible wall to escape.

“This has to be changed, the name of our organization is misspelled.”

“Sure,” I say, “Let’s do it.”

“We have to vote on it.”

“What?”

“It’s a change in the by-laws. Therefore it has to be put to a vote.”

“You’re joking.”

They ignore me. “Anyone willing to put forth a motion that we correct the spelling in By-Law 48, section 2, sub-section A?”

A hand raises from a zombified board member. “We have a motion on the floor from Cara to change the spelling in the name of our organization to reflect the actual spelling in By Law 48, Section 2, Sub-section A. Do we have a second.”

I think of Kafka. The motion passes. After all that hard work, we have lunch.

Cosmologists have posited that the universe is a living, breathing being and that all life is a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm of the universe. Each of us contains a sun, the rhythm of the moon. On a smaller scale, our blood is like the earth’s rivers, the trees our lungs. Our relationships reflect the galactic dance. I contemplate the notion that a board of directors meeting is like a black hole – you get sucked in, and nothing escapes.

“So that went really well,” smiles the President. “We passed a motion. Let’s check in with each other shall we? How are things going for you all?”

To my shock, as we go around the table, each board member offers a self congratulatory platitude. “Well, it was a tough year, but I think we’re now on the right track.”

“I’m feeling very positive about the direction we are going in.”

There is a rumbling inside of me. My face is getting hot. If I am a reflection of the planet I’m a volcano, if I’m a microcosm of the universe, I’m about to go supernova.

I take a breath and explode. “I’m sick of us operating from fear. I can’t understand why everyone is operating from an attitude of lack. If we are all about functionality, why are we so dysfunctional? Why can’t we just try to change? So what if we make a mistake? Einstein once said, ‘Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’”

My voice is quivering. They’re going to hate me. They’re going to tell me I’m over-reacting. A little voice whispers that they are going to kick me off the board. Which actually sounds good at the moment. But no one moves. They sit, mouths open; egos singed, smoke trailing out of their ears.

Like a comet striking the earth, I have disrupted the status quo. Emotional debris is everywhere, smoldering ruins of a meeting. A collective breath and the President speaks. “I’m really glad you said that. Let’s take a risk.”

Another board member speaks up. “Thank you. I feel the same way, I was just afraid to say it.” The sun begins to shine on our group.

I’m a volcano. A comet. A storm. My husband calls me Kali, the Hindu Goddess associated with both destruction and empowerment (although he seems to forget the goddess part.) It’s not an easy job, but somebody’s got to do it. I think this is why I wasn’t elected prom queen.

Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.

For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com

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