Discerning (ahead of you, mentor) ultra-cons have an accusation they consider worse than "Marxist": Redistributionist.

And here is my corporate tale. I belong to two of what are called health clubs. I have been a member of what essentially became the Bally's [Total Fitness] chain since 1983, and I joined L. A. Fitness in 1997 to stop paying $9 or so per indoor biking class at places I loved but were, well, expensive. Thanks to a wanna-be Danny De Vito hustler who was managing a Bally's over 20 years ago I had a guaranteed yearly membership there for $50 and never let it lapse. L. A. Fitness was suggested by a teacher and friend, "M. C.", at both chains who figures in today's story. That one is $99 per annum. People joining either chain have since paid a lot more.

LAF just took over the very ailing BTF and the locations are being converted to the former company. My Bally's card sits in a murky would-be stack of mementoes and I figure I'm with LAF from now on, big deal. More than a few fellow patrons, however, have harped on me to look into cutting a deal with the cheaper one and I simply wanted to ask after she led her class today what MC, who always has had a thorough overview of patrons and protocol, thought.

Oops. Among other sentiments: "What I would do is revoke all memberships and set everyone at $200 a month." She didn't snap but it came with the kind of heat a good, and sometimes not so good, class has in which the momentum and workload move in a tandem too fast to itemize. Bally's ran into problems with memberships like I had as rent, power and other expenses spiked and now, she bristled,
LAF is going to learn it has to close a lot more locations, not comprehending what it's taken on. And while BTF wasn't as good a paying place for staff as, say, "24 Hour---", instructors have taken further pay cuts in the LAF scheme.

It's a page out of Malcolm Gladwell and others, the topic of serendipity. Many of us who get some breaks are not the scions for whom the Debbie J. Slanders' of the far right media haul incense by the truckload (yes, a recent column enraged me, you lucky guessers!) but when a bigger picture of the unfortunate in the world is observed . . .

Yes, "MC", said I, you remind me of the otherwise very sage classmate at LAF who exploded when I mentioned my then imminent retirement, 90-odd percentile of a higher wage long before, which would furnish me with more income than that of the fellow speaking to her.

Will I learn? MC turned her next excoriation to pensions (like mine, natch) and the dragging down of Los Angeles.

But I'll be back to LAF to work on redistributing what an aging body insists on dishing out. Even if I'll be rebuffed yet again.