British actress in a onesie is keeping America’s kids fit and entertained.
“Our story begins on a warmsummer’s day, with the sun in the sky,” says a brunette woman who is wearing an oversize bow and appears to be standing in the middle of a cartoon garden. “So we reach up to the sky and say, ‘Hello, sun!’ ”
It’s story time. It’s gym class.
The woman stretches and waves, then lies on the ground, inviting her young viewers to follow along with her movements. Over the next 30minutes, she’ll act out the story of “Alice in Wonderland,” getting on hands and knees to hop like the White Rabbit, running in circles while racing an imaginary dodo bird and dropping to her belly as she pretends to be the blue, pipe-smoking caterpillar — a move yogis would recognize as cobra pose. At the end she lies still, like Alice recalling her dream. “It makes us think about our dreams, too,” she sighs. “How wonderful our imagination can be — the stories we think of, the places we can go in our head.”
The pandemic has taught us themanymeanings of “essential workers” — the doctors, nurses, grocery workers, bus drivers and others who are holding the world together. For parents of young children, “essential” is also the right word to describe the quirky British yoga lady in the blue jumpsuit.
She is amodern-day Mary Poppins whosemagic, child-wrangling powers come not from songs but deep-breathing exercises andmindfulmovements, allowing their exhausted caretakers 15, 20, maybe even 25 blessed minutes for
themselves. She has become America’s de facto phys ed teacher, calling millions of children to attention with her secret yoga code word: “Naaamaaaa-stayyyyy.”
Which is quite a turn of events for Jaime Amor, 41. Ninemonths ago, she was a children’s birthday-party entertainer who for years had lostmoney making yoga videos for kids. Videos that were popular but not, you know, essential.
“It’s been absolutely nuts,” Amor says in a Zoom interview, her thick eyebrows climbing skyward.
Amor trained to be a classical actress and moved to London in her 20s. She auditioned a lot and got a few parts, but often felt uncomfortable in front of a camera. She felt her presence was somehow too big, too theatrical — “like I’ma caricature,” she says. To pay the rent, she started doing children’s parties, dressing up as a fairy or a princess or a pirate and
telling stories. With 5-yearolds, the bigger and more theatrical, the better.
By 2010, a friendship with a roommate, Martin Amor, had turned to romance. After a trip to the Burning Man festival, they made the snap decision to leave London for a quieter life in a village not far from Jaime’s hometown. Waves of regret soon followed. “It took me six months of having a proper identity crisis. Of going, ‘I’m not an actor anymore. I don’t knowwhat to do. I don’t know who I am,’ ” she recalls. She trained to become a yoga teacher.
In 2011, after leading an after-school cooking club at a local elementary school, Amor decided itmight be fun to teach the kids yoga. Rather than just lead the kids through sun salutations, she told her old birthday party stories, having students act out the characters’ motions on their mats. The club was so popular that Amor was soon doing
15 classes a week around town, lugging a giant sack of yoga mats everywhere she went.
Amor’s husband, Martin, worked in consulting, advising businesses on branding and innovation strategies. On a trip to Silicon Valley, he had a revelation. Broadband was just being rolled out, and every tech executive he met with wanted to talk about “content.”
“I remember standing in amall in San Francisco, calling ( Jaime) saying, ‘Video. We’re going to do some video,’ ” he recalls.
They hired a cameraman with a green screen. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it was on a really fun TV background?” Amor remembers saying. “I don’t want to look like a hot yoga girl. I want to look like a Teletubby.” A photo of Harry Styles rocking an adult onesie in the airport was the inspiration for her outfit.
For two months in 2012, the pair was too embarrassed to show the videos to anyone. “We thought they were weird,” Jaime Amor says. But gradually they picked up a following on YouTube — friends first, then strangers. To bankroll better production values, Martin Amor sold a house he owned and the couple spent some of their savings. A digital animator helped Jaime Amor’s yoga-inflected storytelling come alive. Kids seemed to love her expressive face and exciting stories, each of which asked children to take on the role of the hero and offered subtle lessons of empowerment and social responsibility.
Then the virus hit, trapping families inside their homes. Confined to their own 753-square-foot home, the Amors watched the views on Jaime’s videos surge.
“Before we had a hundred thousand views a day on average,” Jaime Amor says. “And it jumped up to over amillion views in a day.”
They suspect that teachers who used the videos in their classrooms emailed the links home to parents. So instead of registering one group viewing played in school, it was recording 20 or 30 views from kids at home. Many gym teachers, who face a new challenge in finding ways to get their students moving remotely, in whatever little space they have at home, are turning to Amor’s yoga videos.
The couple started hearing from agents, producers and brand managers. And parents. Somany parents. “They were just saying that it was a godsend,” Jaime Amor says. “That it was something that they could leave their kids in front of, guilt-free, and know that they were staying active. And that it was helping them feel calmer in quite an anxious time.”
In the entertainment world, more than in other industries, being essential has benefits. The Amors are currently in talks for a television deal.
Sometimes, when the couple slows down to take their own deep breaths, they talk about how it feels as if the universe aligned them with this moment. And they talk about how nice it is, now that they’re making a profit, that no one thinks they’re crazy anymore.
Still, there have been moments during the past six months when Jaime Amor felt as if she’d slipped into a strange rabbit hole of her own.
“It was a real adventure to suddenly gain that attention,” she says.
And like all of her adventures, this one will probably end the same way it began — with the secret yoga code word, “Naaamaaaa-stayyyyy.”