Moviefone Copyright 2011, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. Moviefone Good old fashioned elbow grease. Tony Horton comes to my apartment to kick my behind. I'm talking, of course, about fitness instructor Tony Horton, the leader of the popular P90X extreme training system.

For the past 30 days (or "Phase One" in P90X lingo), my girlfriend Michele and I have committed ourselves to the program, and to Tony. It's been absolute hell on our bodies. But, we're both former athletes tired of the prefix, so the program has been tremendous for both of us, and to struggle through the workouts together, it's been comic relief for our relationship. You really get to know your partner well when you're writhing on the ground side by side, cursing at a workout video.

And we really have been writhing on the ground. The program is tough; there's six different videos every week for twelve weeks and each routine is a demanding hour-plus with dozens of painful exercises with ridiculous names. Such as, a souped-up version of jumping jacks called "wacky jacks"; an impossible abdominal exercise called "crunchy frog" where you must extend your knees in a seated position and lean back and forth with arms wide; and there's a core exercise called "superman bananas" which requires rolling back and forth with legs in the air. I pity our neighbors downstairs who must listen to us shouting "I hate bananas!" as we pour with sweat and bang our fists on the ground.

The best part about doing the program with Michele -- aside from both of us getting back into shape -- is that we have a daily activity to do together that doesn't involve a crappy show about New Jersey housewives. The second best part is decoding midday conversations where one of us subtly hints at taking the day off.

"Babe, I'm really sore today," she said last week.

"Yeah, me too," I responded.

"So... you know."

"We can't skip it tonight! Tony will be pissed!"

"But I hate crunchy frogs!"

I hate crunchy frogs too. They're brutal. But we've formed a bond with Tony that's too strong to be undone by our hatred for Dreya rolls, the Groucho walk or crunchy frogs.

There's also diet regimen which accompanies the exercise program, but we've decided to just eat sensibly instead. Gone is take-out Chinese food -- we now cook all our meals. By we, I mean she does most of the work, and I am a sous-chef, relegated to mostly simple tasks like chopping (decimating), seasoning meat (pouring different spices on meat and hoping it tastes good), and testing if whole wheat pasta is cooked through (I throw it at the wall to see if it sticks). I try.

These are late dinners, by the way. By the time the workday is over and we've finished our workouts, it's after 10 p.m. So we stagger around the kitchen, completely sore; her legs ache and my lower back has been tender for a week. The discomfort even led to a separate incident when I decided to combat the back soreness with a bag of frozen vegetables and a layer of Icy-Hot -- at the same time. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. Just trust me.

But despite all the pain, the soreness and the time commitment, it's been completely worth it. In 60 more days, or two more phases, I'm sure we'll both be athletes again and we'll have done it together.

And each night until then, we'll lay in bed moaning, "Damn you, Tony. Damn you."]]> Thu, 3 Jun 2010 11:56:23 EDT 582666
Last week the four of us tried again at my parents' quasi-retirement condominium in Boca Raton, Florida to celebrate my father's 60th birthday. Now at age 27 and my brother at 30, we expected that a family vacation would be a little bit different this time around. After all, we were adults now. But it was the same as I remembered. The only thing that changed were our ages and the type of cameras we used.

My father, brother and I arrived in Fort Lauderdale on three separate flights while my mother, who arrived a day earlier, taxied around the airport in her 1997 Saab hatchback, a vehicle better suited for circus clowns than her and three grown men. She did her best Danica Patrick impression as she raced around the airport 15 times with giant sunglasses on, picking us up one at a time at separate terminals.

The condominium is a true life version of Del Boca Vista. You know how I know? Because the condominium board needed 17 votes to decide what color to paint the exterior of the building. And everything moves a little bit slower there, except the task force which militantly enforces the Turtle Bill, a law that requires each resident to install tinted windows to protect sea turtles' nesting areas from light.

Moments after arriving on a mostly empty beach later in the day, we innately snapped into an old beach routine that we hadn't practiced in 15 years: Mom walks around aimlessly collecting sea-shells; dad falls asleep in a beach chair, snores, and in two hours wakes up looking seven shades darker; my brother goes for a swim then reads a book; and I sit there juggling a football, observing all of them while periodically bitching about the heat.

On the way off the beach, mom showed off her brand-new move, which, I believe, only works in Del Boca Vista: she walked halfway onto a crosswalk on a busy highway and waved her hands wildly at traffic in both directions, her comical but frightening way of telling them to stop, because she wasn't going to. Fortunately, the cars did.

Something else that didn't change in 15 years was my mom's underestimation of our ability to clean ourselves after a day on the beach.

"Make sure you wash your whole body!" my mom yelled at my brother from outside the bathroom. "Use soap! Really get your whole body!"

"Mom! I'm 30-(expletive)-years old! I know how to bathe myself!"

The next morning, my brother and I took dad out for a round of golf. In the month leading up to this trip, he told us often about how much his game had improved thanks to lessons he had been taking with a 92-year-old man whom my dad proclaimed "an American treasure." I wasn't expecting an Arnold Palmer-like performance from dad, but I expected a decent shot from the tee and something that resembled a golf swing. Not quite. He looked like a five-year-old swinging a mallet at a carnival game. But he doesn't care, he just likes some fresh air and an afternoon with his sons.

Actually, the person who turned in the most incredible performance of the weekend was the waiter at the steakhouse for dad's big dinner. Vinny was about 5' 8" with speckled gray hair and the perfect demeanor, like the Sandy Koufax of waiters. He was in no rush with us at all but moved quickly and with purpose and kept our drinks filled. Of course my mom is bombed off two cosmopolitans, but my brother and I buried ourselves in whiskey and Mojitos.

We marveled at Vinny's grace while we waited the valet stand and watched a row of expensive cars arrive for other restaurant-goers who like that kind of toy. First a Corvette, then a Rolls Royce, and then my Mom's 1997 Saab hatchback. We stuffed into the clown car and eventually left on three separate flights.

Although my brother and I were adults for this trip, mom and dad still introduced us to neighbors as "the kids." It was actually kind of refreshing. No matter how old you get, you'll always be your parents' child. And if you're my mother's son, you'll always need bathing instructions. ]]> Sun, 2 May 2010 22:06:18 EDT 560416 Tonight Show, which he called "the greatest television franchise of all time" -- but a guy is better off with the girl next door rather than the prom queen. The prom queen is usually a prude and the girl next door is the closet freak who lets you do anything you want with her.

"He can do whatever he wants to do here," Steve Koonin, the president of Turner Entertainment Networks, told Entertainment Weekly. "We had a great proposition. We have a great environment, we are young, we are a branded comedy network."

O'Brien's lead-in on TBS will be Family Guy, compared with network evening news at his old home. You know who watches network evening news? Old people. Old people who probably aren't into Conan O'Brien. O'Brien's fans wondered if his act would become more "refined" at 11:30, and he assured them it wouldn't. But the experiment is over, and if the success of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Chelsea Handler weren't evidence enough of a shifting late-night paradigm, this is it.

Because O'Brien's exit deal with NBC prevents him from going back on the air before the fall, there's some time to kill, but both TBS and O'Brien are using the time wisely. With a new slogan, "Coco is with TBS," the station has already reached out to O'Brien's hardcore fans. Meanwhile, O'Brien is out touring with the slogan "A night of music, comedy, hugging, and the occasional awkward silence." Hugging, apparently, is how he connects with his fans.

"There's a bit of sexual tension between you and I," O'Brien once told me during his audience warm-up before a taping of Late Night With Conan O'Brien. "Come here and give me a hug."

A high school senior skipping school a little more than a decade ago, I didn't expect to find myself in O'Brien's arms before a packed studio when they shuffled me and my friends into the second row. My head square against O'Brien's chest -- he's six-foot-four, and, well, I'm not -- we took turns man-patting each other's backs.

"There, that's better," he said. My face was bright red but I enjoyed playing along. "Now why don't you go hug that guy over there?" he said, pointing me towards a 50-something guy with slicked back hair and yellow teeth. I obliged, and from that moment forward I was no longer a young fan but also a part of the act, for a day at least.

He hasn't hugged all his fans and audience members, but throughout his 16-year run as host of Late Night and his abbreviated stint as the Tonight Show host, O'Brien has filled the space that divides a TV-star and the average viewer with humanness and relentless self-deprecation. Maybe he had to develop that sensibility; he's a giant red-headed comedian with a penchant for dancing poorly, and his monologues -- short and formulaic -- aren't his strength. O'Brien's greatest asset has always been his personality.

"I had a show," O'Brien wrote in his Twitter bio. "Then I had a different show. Now I have a Twitter account." Now he's got almost a million followers and there's billboards scattered across the U.S. featuring his 140-character updates. He never could have imagined trading in his Tonight Show digs for a Twitter account and a trip to cable television, but when the opportunity presented, maybe O'Brien realized that TBS is the best way to embrace his fans. Of course the shakeup is sweeter with a $45 million buyout and carte blanche to do anything short of defecate on a effigy of NBC CEO Jeff Zucker.

So what might the first week of O'Brien's show look like on TBS? I imagine a sketch where the Horny Manatee attempts to seduce the Masturbating Bear and Little Jay Leno gets run over by a truck. Something like that.


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