Hiram on Lolita

Well, actually it's true for the start of a great marriage. It was a most inauspicious debut because I met Lolita when she was married and I was married and I was brought to be a member of the board of directors of a ballet company that Lolita was starting out. But the person that brought me here to this board of directors meeting was not the person that later on would have a good relationship with Lolita. So I was sort of on the side of this friend of mine and Lolita was on the other side. But two years later when we met again, Lolita's marriage was breaking up and my marriage was breaking up. So that's when we started going out together.

Lolita is a very independent woman and I love it. I was brought up by my mother who was also very independent because she was a professional. So, I liked that. And together I think we make a very great pair because I liked the independence in a woman and as a colleague, back in the bank when I worked in City Bank for example, I always promoted people, especially women, to be more ambitious and to do greater things for themselves. And so I liked that. And as a matter of fact, I don't think I work well with a wife that was a dependent wife. Although I don't do Pilates with Lolita. I do Pilates as designed by Lolita. For me, since I was not doing Pilates, she designed a series of exercises because I like to walk. And she told me, you know, you walk and you're wasting most of your body because you're only using your legs, so why don't you use your upper body and try some of the exercises that are Pilates based.

So she designed a series of them and I took to them. I really liked it. And I do whenever I can. And it takes about a half hour to 45 minutes. So it's a good cardio workout. You do it standing up and you do it fast if you do it. So it's called Pilates Bodywalk and she designed it for me. There's a DVD that she did. Lolita has so many strengths, great strengths.

She's like a bundle of strengths. There are two that really stand out. One is her intuition. She has great intuition. She always had that sixth sense of doing, making the right choices, so that sort of leads her down a path that she's done the right thing. Everything comes, I think, not, let's say easy, but it's made the road less hard. And I'm really blessed that she took that road towards me and I was one of those choices she made. I think it was the right choice too. The second strength that I think is very outstanding, is her capacity to work. I've never seen anybody with that capacity for work. It's really awesome, and fearsome because really, you know, you have to tell her it's time to stop. It's also one of her weaknesses because it is, let's say the dark side of capacity for work is that you become a workaholic and that's the other side. That's her greatest weakness because she spent so much time doing it and that the balance of work, rest, and play sort of gets out of whack since she believes so strongly in what she does. And she demands excellence all the time. I mean, there's no excuse for not doing things right and doing it well. So Lolita can get a little annoyed and can lose her temper. That's one thing that is part of her mission. So if she feels very strongly about something, you can expect that she's not going to be satisfied if you're doing very, very poorly. Another thing that I think perhaps, but it's not a weakness, but I think it's a strength more than anything else, is she's not a nostalgic person. You know, she lost her father when she was 11 and she lost her son when he was only two years old, right in her arms. That kind of trauma can affect a person and you don't want to look back, you just want to look, enjoy the moment or look forward. No, don't because it's nothing that can allay whatever happened in the past.

So it's not that she's harsh or anything, but she's not a nostalgic person. When we travel, I basically carry the suitcases, and I sort of act as a financial person, so I always have to be the one to collect the money for the fees of whether it's for the travel and all those expenses, and I also have to make sure that everything is in order so that we arrive at the hotel, it is a good hotel. Everything is taken care of. Those little things and all the travels we've done, one really stands out. And that is the one time that we unveiled the plaque for Joseph Pilates in his hometown. Not only in his hometown, precisely in the location where he was born. So it was very, very significant for the Pilates industry. We had a lot of people there. It was really, really magnificent.

And of all the travels that really stand out and Lolita's contribution to the Pilates Industry has been her, well, first of all, that she knew Joe personally and has been able to transmit what Joe wanted. I think she has the spirit that Joe had from what she has told me. And that is that he was always tweaking things. She was always trying to better what he had made, both the apparatuses that he had built as well as the exercises that he had created. So Lolita has that in mind because let us not forget that she was the last person to get the information that Joe had. His last thoughts on the method. She was there for that. And because she finished in 1967 and he died in 1967, those last ideas and the spirit that he had, I think Lolita captured it very well.

She doesn't want to continue doing a museum piece of a Pilates exercises. She says, you know, we must always look forward. We must always try to do things to better what we already have. So I think that that will hopefully live on.