With observations like "the theater is a temple, not a gym," "The Frogs" also poked fun at its own pretensions.
Kundalini class can be a good workout, but its teachers and students (often wearing white turbans) participate in each kriya with a quiet reverence more akin to a temple than a gym.
"Hey there," William said, announcing himself, hair mashed flat against his temple, shirtless and in gym shorts.
Six months later, she faced her first opponent at Gleason's Gym, the boxing temple beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
Young men like Mr. Rios, most of whom come from single-parent families in poor areas of the South Bronx, use the gym as a temple of dreams.
The writer was Kate Sekules, an editor at Food & Wine magazine who found herself drawn to the gyms of SoHo and later Gleason's Gym, that boxing temple of world champions.
She "made weight" at her gym, visited a Buddhist temple to ask for good luck during her fight from the resident monks, and fought someone over eight inches taller than her.
Even the heralded Conseco Fieldhouse, home of the National Basketball Association Indiana Pacers, harks back to 1920's high school gyms -- a retro temple to basketball, comfortable as an old sock with warm brick and tiled walls, and girders and trusses that cast nostalgic shadows across the crowd.
I sat in a mini-gym class at the temple nearby with a baby in my lap and another one under it.
There's the nearby Ling Shen Ching Tze Temple, a Buddhist temple in the former gym of Immanuel Presbyterian Church.
Rock Hard Gym is not a sleek and shiny temple of sweat, coaxing in patrons with air-conditioning, lap pools and rock-climbing walls.
