Workout Fanservice/Quotes

"The reason we think of Muscle Beach was a bunch of muscular men lifting weights in Speedo-style trunks is because that's what it largely became in the later years - after the acrobats who made up the tapestry of Muscle Beach's first decade moved on. —Marla Metzger Rose, Muscle Beach: Where the Best Bodies in the World Started a Fitness Revolution

"Sometimes on an oppressively hot day, she would throw together an improvised picnic lunch - a couple of cold franks, a tomato half a lettuce and take a bus to Muscle Beach. Jim had shown her where it was one Sunday. He believed in keeping fit and did some calisthenics everyday, but he told her those "muscle boys" have gone around the bend. When one of the young men tried to make conversation with her, she raised her hand with her wedding band, then smiled to show there were no hard feelings. Of course, this has to be Dougherty's memory of what she had told him after coming back from such a day and it is perfectly possible she had secret flirtations with one. But we my as well accept her story as true, for it is likely she would have been transfixed by the narcissism of the weightlifters. Such shamelessness at slaving openly for one's own beauty had to suggest possibilities for herself." —Norman Mailer, Marilyn: a biography

"I completely forgot that Dane Joan was in a Holiday Health Club commercial in the olden days. Dane Joan is auctioning the deflated purple satin bundt cake headband she wore on her head and the exquisite leotard that hugged her pristine oyster. Jullien's estimate that it will get $400 to $600. That must be a major typo. That estimate is missing a whole lot of zeroes. I mean, that leotard has touched Dane Joan's goddess crotch. It should get at least $60,000,000." —Michael K.

"This is Muscle Beach.", Adam explains. He's wrong. This is Heaven. Men. strong beefy men as far as the eye can see, are lifting weights as far as the eye can see, are lifting weights, right here in the sand. Some of them are those gross action-figure weirdoes with veins sticking out along their neck, but some of them are yummy cover boys. I'm hungry. I step off the boardwalk and mingle with the muscles. Adam is close behind me. "They say this all started back in the thirties." Right, blah, blah, blah. He gives me a history lesson I don't hear. I join a crowd watching a Greek god raise a barbell above his head. All the women and about half the men are admiring the guy's, ahem, equipment. Those Speedos don't leave much to the imagination, thank goodness. —Laurie Halse Anderson, Snake