But things can quickly spiral out of control. Television producer Will Lee’s favorite kick-boxing instructor started switching the gym where he taught, and so, said Mr. Lee, “I would call him to find out where he was teaching.” Mr. Lee, 34, said that when he used to go to this particular instructor’s class during the day, he was one of the only men in the class. “I was working from home at the time, so I could go to an 11 a.m. class,” he said. “So just to stake my claim I’d sort of bro down with him. There were all these Upper West Side women preening for him.”
Mr. Lee continued: “We actually talked about hanging out. He would talk about going to dance clubs and he’d say, ‘If you want to come down, you should come.’ And he’s a big video game guy, so I got him video games for Christmas, and once a pretty fat gift certificate to Best Buy.”
Indeed, some instructors are more than happy to hang out with their favorites outside of class. “I’m getting paid to be in the room with some of the fiercest, coolest people in New York,” said Mr. Hendricks. “Who wouldn’t want to hang out with them?”
“It’s a very fine line,” said Edmee Cherdieu, the group exercise manager at the Sports Club/LA at Rockefeller Center. “They want to hang out with you. But they can’t call you on the cell phone. It can get to the point where it gets creepy.”
Maybe what the teacher’s pe
ts are really looking for is more than validation—it’s friendship, in a city that can seem cold and forbidding and where it can be easier to get laid by putting an ad on Craigslist than to make a new, actual friend. Or maybe it’s that New Yorkers are so used to being so competitive, at work and at play and in finding apartments, that to become the instructor’s favorite means, in some small way, that they’ve won. They’ve asserted their superiority in this venue in addition to all the others.
“I want to be the one in control in my yoga class,” said the Cobble Hill architect. “I want to be a little more talented than everyone else, but I also want to be a little more in the know. By being close to the teacher, you’re in the club. It’s definitely a clubhouse feeling.”
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