Word: spa
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...Varsity Spa is in. Hostess cupcakes are out; green salads with minced clams are in. Eating with utensils is out; using hands and other foods to eat with is in. Spooning plain yogurt into half an avocado is in, as is wheat germ, which always has been: dining hall veal cutlets which look like wallets are out. Putting Wheatena in your mouth is out; putting it on your mouth...
Back in Cambridge, there is a spot that approaches the interest of a cultural museum. The Varsity Spa, located where Mt. Atiourn and Mass Ave converge, stays open only until three-thirty but is open to visitors from near dawn until then. The window sills are caked with dust and old boxes of Nabisco crackers: one wall of shelves is lined with random canned goods from previous decades. The Coca-Cola dispenser on the counter is a nostalgic relic-one of the old red shiny rounded numbers which looks like a Packard's back fender. The man and the wife...
...During the preliminary physical examination, Medical Director Dr. R. Philip Smith smiles benevolently and says that you are not fat; it's just that "your chest has fallen a bit." Sucking in your stomach, you proceed into the lush, hushed inner sanctum of the Men's Spa. The design is Spanish modern, the ambience neo-Nero. Through glass walls you see a garden with a Roman pool gurgling in the sun. Stationed here and there like bouncers are the "gentlemen technicians," muscular young men in tight, white T-shirts who seem to be flaunting their triceps...
Surrounded by such specimens, you stand nude for the weigh-in ceremonies and realize what a wreck you are. Then out of the gymnasium waddles some titan of industry looking like a grapefruit in his gold stretch-nylon sweatsuit. "Hi, tiger!" says Spa Director Ward Hutton. "You've got a good sweat going!" Wearily looking up, the titan mutters, "Hello, muscles." Suddenly you don't feel embarrassed any more...
...tortilla into sheets soaked in a steaming brew of "21 exotic Oriental herbs." When done to a spicy turn, you plop into a hydrother-apeutic bath frothing with sesquicar-bonates, lithium chloride, magnesium sulfate, hexachlorophene-everything, presumably, but cyclamates. BELLY BUDGETING. More appetizing recipes are offered in the spa's dietetic dining room. There guests bend over their menus like accountants, busily subtracting a prune whip (40 calories) here and adding a rutabaga julienne (36) there. "Spoof champagne" is served from big icy bottles with popping corks. As your dinner companions chat about "bulging adipose tissue" and "draining metabolic...