HEALTH & FITNESS COLUMN
‘Healthonism:’ Work
hard, play hard
L
ast August, on the
last weekend of my
summer internship,
I entered a four-mile race in
Bethlehem, PA. Though the
town was
typically
quiet that
summer,
empty of
neigh-
boring
Lehigh
Uni-
versity
students,
this par-
ticular weekend marked the
grand opening of Musikfest: a
10-day extravaganza of bands,
beer and every form of fried
food you can imagine, attended
by more than a million people
each year. Luckily, not every
visitor entered the race that
morning, and I was able to snag
the first place prize: two tick-
ets to a concert of my choice
(the options were O.A.R.,
Snoop Dogg and 3 Doors
Down; I chose O.A.R.) and a
refillable beer mug the size of a
small child.
I was thrilled. Sticking my
swag behind a tree, I ran a
few cool-down miles to shake
out my stiffening muscles, but
I could hear music swelling
over the distant festival tents
and gurgles of beer from a
tap, willing me to join the fun.
Later, regrouped at last with
my summer roommates, I
posed for a picture in my race
bib, a banana in one hand and
a complimentary can of Coors
Light in the other. My caption
on Instagram read, “Post-race
carbo load at its finest.”
It’s no secret that working
out hard tends to warrant
celebration. My race was
just one among thousands
of running events that offer
drinks at the finish line — and
I’m not just talking Gatorade.
Disney’s Wine-and-Dine Half
Marathon ends at the Epcot
International Food and Wine
Festival; a new 10K race in
the U.K. offers wine instead
of water at rest stops, with
full bottles available for
purchase at the finish. And
then there’s the Marathon du
Médoc in French wine country,
the mackdaddy of party
races, in which participants
are encouraged to drink 23
different glasses of wine and
sample cheese, oysters, foie
gras and ice cream — all while
somehow finishing 26.2 miles.
Marathon du Médoc’s goal?
To make a running event
that combines “wine, sports,
fun and health.” And if trend
predictions are accurate, this
unlikely combination of health
and indulgence may soon be
more common than you think.
“Healthonism,” a term
coined by J. Walter Thompson
Intelligence, was featured in
December on The Future 100,
a list of top trends to watch for
in 2016. Fox News describes
the healthonism trend as such:
“health-conscious millennials
are offsetting consumption of
alcohol with antioxidants and
healthy mixers — mashing up
exercise with hedonism, and
flocking to a growing number
of exercise-meets-drinking
events.”
Hedonism, a lifestyle most
associated with the wealthy
men of leisure in 17th century
England (think Oscar Wilde’s
“Picture of Dorian Gray”),
isn’t as antiquated as it sounds:
hedonists simply pursue a life
of pleasure and experiences,
rather than obeying structured
rules of society. So a modern
hedonist may be a high school
student who chooses to travel
indefinitely instead of going
to college, or a celebrity who
spends a fortune on plastic
surgery but donates nothing
to charity. “Healthonism” is
similar in that healthonists
also seek out the good life —
refusing to miss out on a party
or pass up a drink — but they
do so in a health-conscious
way. Healthonists don’t just
party; they get crunk after
completing a marathon, a
group bike ride or a Bikram
yoga session. Similarly,
healthonists don’t just drink;
they imbibe on cocktails with
cold-pressed organic juices,
like Hotamelon Tequila
Cleanse and RaspberryAddict
Vodka Cleanse from the brand
CleanDrinking.
Healthonists eat well, work
out hard and play even harder.
Basically, good health is their
utmost priority — until they’re
undermining it.
Mixing alcohol and an active
lifestyle, or really any healthy
lifestyle, has been an obvious
no-no for years. Though
there are reported benefits
of drinking moderately —
the Mediterranean Diet,
recommended for Americans
by the 2016 Dietary Guidelines,
includes a daily glass of wine
— most doctors and exercise
scientists agree that if you
must drink, one to two glasses
is the maximum you should
have. Going past this limit,
especially for active people,
can wreak havoc on your
health. Alcohol lowers your
blood sugar, making you crave
sweet and fatty foods; disrupts
sleep patterns, impeding
recovery; and it packs on
pounds, as boozy calories have
zero nutritional value.
Despite these negative
consequences, athletes still
drink. And they drink even
more on days when they
exercise the most, according
to a recent article in CNN.
Scientists have speculated a
few reasons why particularly
strenuous workouts (or races)
inspire people to drink: there’s
the “celebration factor,” when
teams to want celebrate after
a big win or runners regroup
at a bar for post-long run
beers; there’s also the guilt
factor, perhaps more common,
when athletes plan an intense
workout before a big night out
with friends.
Case in point: New Year’s
Eve at the gym. I was there
with the rest of my hometown
this past December, getting my
weight lifting in before the big
night, when our family friend
shouted up to me from his
elliptical: “Gotta burn off all
those beer calories!”
I’d like to say that I don’t do
this, that I’m not a healthonist.
Yet I find myself planning my
longest run of the week the
morning before going out that
night; and if you asked whether
I stick to lean chicken, veggies
and water as a post-race
recovery meal, I’d probably
laugh. (For the record, my
go-tos are ice cream and wine.)
Am I hurting my health
by celebrating occasionally?
Maybe a little. But you can bet
that if I didn’t have a concert
ticket and beer mug calling my
name in the Musikfest race this
summer, I wouldn’t have ran as
hard or as fast as I did. A little
motivation never hurt anybody,
as long as the celebration is
kept in moderation. Let’s raise
a cold-pressed juice cocktail
to that.
Middlebrook is enjoying a fine
wine and cheese platter after her
daily five mile run. To ask how
you too can enjoy this lifestyle,
e-mail hailharp@umich.edu.
HAILEY
MIDDLEBROOK
It’s no secret
working out
hard warrants
celebration.
Successful superhero
portrayal on The CW
By BEN ROSENSTOCK
Senior Arts Editor
The latest spinoff of The CW’s
lucrative superhero franchise,
“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,”
has a lot of
problems
to
overcome
in
its
two-part
premiere,
and it doesn’t
make
it
through with-
out stumbling.
Still, by the
end of its sec-
ond hour, the
show
estab-
lishes itself as
potentially
a
very promising addition to the
superhero genre.
“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”
brings together minor char-
acters from “Arrow” and “The
Flash” to form an Avengers-like
team of heroes. The leader is Rip
Hunter (Arthur Darvill, “Doc-
tor Who”), a time traveler who
assembles the team, like Nick
Fury from the Avengers mixed
with the Doctor from “Doctor
Who.” Rip picks Ray “The Atom”
Palmer (Brandon Routh, “Super-
man
Returns”),
resurrected
assassin Sara “White Canary”
Lance (Caity Lotz, “Mad Men”),
supervillains
Leonard
“Cap-
tain Cold” Snart and Mick
“Heat Wave” Rory (Wentworth
Miller and Dominic Purcell
from “Prison Break”), nuclear
physicist Martin Stein (Vic-
tor Garber, “Argo”) and former
high school athlete Jefferson
Jackson (Franz Drameh, “Edge
of Tomorrow”), the last two of
whom fuse together to form the
Human Torch-esque Firestorm.
There’s also Kendra “Hawk-
girl” Saunders (Ciara Renée,
“Big Fish” the musical) and
Carter “Hawkman” Hall (Falk
Hentschel, “StreetDance 2”), a
reincarnated ancient Egyptian
princess and prince. Rip explains
to the team that they must travel
through time to find and defeat
the immortal Vandal Savage
(Casper Crump, “Helium”), pre-
venting the fall of civilization 100
years into the future.
That’s a lot of exposition to
dole out over the course of a pilot,
especially with 10 major char-
acters, and “Legends” doesn’t
quite manage to do it without
feeling clunky. There are a lot of
requisite expositional lines with
characters blatantly stating their
identities as if introducing them-
selves to the camera.
The show also makes some
unwise moves in characteriza-
tion. Snart’s cartoony anti-hero
persona (aided by Miller’s hilari-
ous line readings) and Sara’s sim-
ple desire to have fun in whatever
time period she’s in make them
early standouts, but other char-
acters don’t leave as much of an
impression. Despite the show’s
insistence that Vandal Savage
is a terrifying threat, Crump
doesn’t have the dark charisma
or coldblooded stare that made
Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett,
“Spartacus”) and Damien Darhk
(Neal
McDonough,
“Desper-
ate Housewives”) such compel-
ling villains in “Arrow.” Worse,
Kendra and Carter immediately
drain life from every scene they
enter, a problem when a big part
of the plot depends on their age-
old battle with Savage. And while
Garber is great as Martin Stein,
Stein gives a bad first impression
when he drugs and kidnaps Jack-
son to force him to join the team
on their first time-traveling mis-
sion.
Plots based around time trav-
eling can be irresistible when
they’re mapped out logically, but
sometimes the plot of “Legends”
requires you to ignore glaring
inconsistencies.
For
example,
after Savage gets a hold of future
tech and as a result catastrophe
happens in 2016, Rip insists that
this is only a projection of the
future; time is like cement, and
it won’t be set in stone until Sav-
age, in the 1975 timeline, manages
to reverse-engineer the future
tech. By itself this logic makes a
sort of “squint and it kind of fol-
lows” sense, but it doesn’t match
up with the show’s established
premise. The team’s whole jour-
ney is predicated on the fact that
time isn’t like cement; it’s more
like water, malleable and not
gradually hardening.
These problems seem sig-
nificant enough to derail a typi-
cal time travel series, but it’s
remarkable how much you can
overlook if something is really
fun, and “Legends of Tomor-
row” is certainly fun. It might
make no sense to have Mar-
tin Stein meet his younger self
in 1975 and for the timeline to
remain completely unchanged,
but damn is it fun to watch. In
terms of entertainment, a team
of snarky superheroes traveling
through time is a recipe for suc-
cess.
The second episode is also a
vast improvement over the first,
with far less clumsy exposition
to deliver. It also smartly varies
the character dynamics, sending
Ray, Snart and Mick out to steal
something while Stein hangs
out with Sara, Jefferson and
his younger self. Unfortunately,
Kendra and Carter are still rel-
egated to their own boring sub-
plot, though the conclusion of
the episode hints that Carter’s
role will be smaller in upcoming
episodes.
“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”
may stumble a bit in its two-part
pilot, but when it comes down to
it, both episodes are entertaining
throughout, and when you have a
couple boring characters in a cast
of 10, the problems aren’t glaring.
If the series continues to focus on
the moments of giddy time travel
fun, it’ll be a more than worthy
addition to the CW Arrowverse.
EVENT PREVIEW
B
DC’s
Legends of
Tomorrow
Series Pre-
miere
Thursdays
at 8 p.m.
The CW
TV REVIEW
THE CW
Looking at your nudes like.
Come ‘Closer’
By MARIA ROBINS
Daily Arts Writer
“Love bores you,” one charac-
ter accuses another. “No, it disap-
points me,” the other responds.
Patrick Marber’s
“Closer”
skips
syrupy-sweet
implications
to
engage with the
underbelly
of
romance.
The
close-up look at
intimacy
gone
wrong is more
relatable
than
we’d often like to
admit.
School
of
Music, Theatre
& Dance senior
David
Barnes
makes his direc-
torial debut with “Closer,” and in it
he allows the audience to come face
to face with shame, deceit and the
disappointment of falling in and
out of love through vignettes that
peek into the lives of four individu-
als. First performed in London in
1997, “Closer” centers on the inter-
twined love lives of two men and
two women in a way that is hardly
romantic. It is peppered with deci-
sions that show desperation and
questionable moral character in the
pursuit of meaningful intimacy.
The production, backed by stu-
dent organization Basement Arts,
focuses on a minimal design while
tackling complex and sophisticated
emotional content. The cast con-
sists of four actors, and the set is
little more than a table and couple
chairs.
“What’s nice about this play is
that it kind of skips all of the lovey-
dovey every day romantic life and
just goes from ultimate romance to
catastrophic disaster, which is real-
ly exciting for the actors because
you’re not doing anything but highs
and lows the whole time,” Barnes
said.
The show is honest and unfil-
tered in a way that was controver-
sial at its outset. Barnes said theater
was a fitting medium for its darker
storylines.
“I think it’s a very relatable show.
I think a lot of theater accents the
reality of humanity and kind of digs
into the dark sides of people, but
this show kind of takes it to another
level, which is why when it came
out in ’97 it was so shocking,” he
said. “It’s certainly less shocking
now, but it explores people doing
shitty things, doing things they
shouldn’t do, doing things that we
— as society — frown upon, which
is so interesting because we all do
stuff like that. We just kind of shove
it under the rug.”
Although, as audience members,
it is challenging to parse where our
sympathies ought to lie, Barnes
suggests that the intention of the
play is not to feel sorry for the char-
acters, but rather understand their
motives and rationale for behavior
that has harmful consequences.
“Everyone
cheats;
everyone
lies; everyone is kind of horrible
to each other, but with good rea-
son,” Barnes said. “I don’t need the
audience to like these characters.
I just need them to understand
them, because all of the things
we’re doing are things we’ve done
or we would do if we were in the
situation, we just tell ourselves we
wouldn’t.”
“Closer” lives up to its title in
the decision to present on a “thrust
stage,” which essentially means
that there is no backstage and the
stage is surrounded by the audience
on three sides.
“Doing it in the thrust is really
exciting because it kind of literally
thrusts the actors into the audience
... the show is very aware that it’s
theater,” Barnes said.
Because the style and form of the
play is so intimate and bare-boned,
the scenes require comprehensive
and meticulous text work, some-
thing that a small cast generously
lends itself to.
“With a small cast I can spend
an hour with two people working
on 15 lines and really dig into it and
really figure out what’s working,
what’s not, why they do every-
thing,” Barnes said.
I saw him do exactly this during a
rehearsal in which two characters,
Anna and Dan, discuss the muddy
terms of their relationship in a res-
taurant. During the scene, Barnes
urged the actors to search for inten-
tion and purpose behind even the
most seemingly small moments.
Everything from an entrance to a
moment of eye contact to an “I’m
not hungry” is probed and replayed
to further convey the emotional
and psychological complexity of
the interpersonal dynamics at play.
Barnes asks the actors questions
like “How does it feel that the per-
fect woman is no longer perfect?”
and asks them to pinpoint moments
of realization that may not be vocal-
ized, but rather expressed through
subtlety of facial expression or
body language.
Barnes explains the process of
creating “Closer” as one that com-
bines creativity with self-reflection
to create multidimensional charac-
ters.
“A lot of it is just using your imag-
ination or personal experience and
putting yourself in the mindset of
where these characters would be,”
Barnes said. “Like, ‘What would
happen if the love of your life sud-
denly walked out the door?’ We talk
about that, we let that simmer.”
Closer
Thurs. Febru-
ary 4, 7 p.m
and 11 p.m.
Fri. February
5, 7 p.m.
Sat. Febru-
ary 6, 7 p.m.
and 11 p.m.
Walgreen
Drama Center
Free
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, February 3, 2016 — 5A