Why the Aerobic Phantom Didn’t Work Out
A voice of our times has been silenced. The Aerobic Phantom is gone from the pages of Windy City Sports.
Back came a letter from Linda Anderson, executive director of New City’s activity center, that would run in WCS’s October issue (from which the Phantom had vanished). Anderson defended her floor as “appropriate to aerobic activity. I ask that you disprove that or print a retraction,” she declared.
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So Mary Thorne and the Phantom had a talk. “She said, basically, this is the end of it,” the Phantom tells us. “She’s a struggling businesswoman herself. From my perspective, she got sick of having to go through that stress every time. She never told me ever to make something good or bad for the sake of advertising or circulation. There was total noninterference. But finally she said, ‘Hey! I can’t take it anymore.’”
In a field that no one regulates, a roving critic with Jareo’s expertise does serve a function. “It’s uncharted territory,” says Jareo. “I consider an aerobics class to some extent a performance. The instructor is to some extent onstage. It’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be safe, it’s supposed to give cardiovascular improvement.
Jareo runs a small advertising and marketing firm, and as it happened, Women’s Workout World was looking for an ad agency. Feeling pretty good about his visit, he called and tried to get their business.
He didn’t get the account.
Dr. Ron Sable, a gay member of Plummer’s veterans commission, knew nothing of this blithe scheme. Neither did Jon Simmons, coordinator of gay and lesbian issues at the Human Rights Commission; neither did Nancy Reiff, a special assistant to the mayor and informal liaison to the gay and lesbian community. Any one of them would have seen this folly for what it was and saved the Daley administration from looking ridiculous.
