This video has been making the blog-rounds for a few weeks now; I'm totally late to the bandwagon. But I'm posting it anyway because:

1) My love for Miss Julia Sugarbaker is real and true, and that love extends to posting excerpts from Dixie Carter's late-80s yoga video.

2) Much of the reaction to this video has been of the "God, what a loon!" variety, which totally misses the point. Yes, the pose looks ridiculous, which she admits straight away.  But she doesn't care, because doing "The Lion" makes her feel good, and she wants her viewers to get the same energy boost. While haters are snickering about how silly she looks, she (or at least, the digitally archieved version of Ms. Carter) is happy, smiling, and content.

A big reason people are reluctant to start working out is their fear of looking stupid. And let's face it—exercise of all varieties often requires a lot of goofy faces, awkward body positioning and uncouth grunts and groans. Most of the time, no one notices, because they're too busy concentrating on their own workout (at the gym) or life dramas (everywhere else).But slap a few isolated moments of an exercise video on YouTube, and it's suddenly comic fodder.

That doesn't mean it's not ok to laugh."The Lion" is more than a little silly, which is why Carter's husband, who perhaps anticipated the mass market for video humiliation that is the Internet, recommended she leave it out of the video. But she didn't—she roared like a loud, proud, yoga-happy crazy woman, and for that, I salute her.