“Have you seen my other sandal?” I asked Andy as I waddled around the apartment. Though summer was allegedly approaching, the weather was nowhere near warm enough to justify such footwear, but my ridiculously swollen feet left me little choice. At this point in my pregnancy, I needed both the open heel and the adjustable buckle.

“It’s right there, under the couch,” Andy said, then reached over and pulled it out.

“Oh,” I said huffily. I should have been able to see the shoe, but it was getting harder to peer over my belly, and the exertion of the search had made me a bit tired. I slipped on the shoe and leaned in to kiss Andy goodbye.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Yoga,” I said, though my tone said, “where else?”

“You’re really serious about this prenatal yoga,” he said as I continued my rush to make it out the door. Pregnancy had not only made me the ankle-less wonder, it had done something I’d once considered impossible: turned me into a yoga devotee.

For years, while my friends raved about their Bikram studios and newfound centeredness, I nodded pleasantly. When they’d manage to drag me to a sample class I’d find myself bored, uncomfortable, and annoyed at the competitiveness over who could turn herself into the most perfect pretzel.

But, physically unable to do much else, I had found prenatal yoga. The Citybaby message board had a full-on rave for a Park Slope studio – “that and this board are the best things about being pregnant!” it had read – and I was now an addict.

My yoga studio was skylit with a plant- and batik-heavy air that was more hippie than sleek. It struck me as very 70s and represented a side of Park Slope – the crunchy, Birkenstock-wearing, soup-making pre-Fifth Avenue Park Slope of the early 1990s.

It was hard to be anything but laid-back in this environment and Maggie, the warm, welcoming teacher who, she told us, was also a labor doula, set the tone for the class, which was heavy on the aches and pains, due date, and baby movement sharing and decidedly low on actual poses.

Yes, some downward dogs were thrown in for good measure, but the most consistent and complicated pose was one where we lay with our butts flat against and legs up along the wall, arms splayed beside us. We could stay there as long as we wanted. And the inversion was supposed to help the swelling. “No wonder you like this yoga,” Andy said when I told him about it. “There’s hardly any yoga in it.”

Much as I loved my coffee klatch/exercise class, this morning, I was keyed up for another reason: It was to be the first time I met a fellow Citybaby message-boarder IRL – in real life.

Ever since I’d been referred to the Union yoga class, I’d had on and off contact with the recommender. It had started after I left that first class. I’d been so into it, I rushed home and posted a thank you and she’d posted back, saying she wasn’t there that day – she couldn’t make it most weekdays – but she would be there over the weekend. I’d replied that for me it was the opposite – my work-from-home schedule made it easier for me to use the class as a lunch break and go on weekdays. “Well,” she’d said, “if you do go to a weekend class, I’ll almost definitely be there!”

So now here I was, going to my first weekend class. I wondered what my yoga poster – as I thought of her- looked like. In my mind’s eye, she was petite, attractive but not dramatically so, and wore the kind of low-key stylish pregnancy clothes that tended not to draw too much attention to themselves – basically, she was a lot like me. As I entered the studio for class, I realized that this was probably how I pictured almost everyone on Citybaby, and this was probably a large, unconscious part of the message board’s appeal: In that virtual Eden, you could make everyone in your image.

I took a purple mat and placed it in an obtrusive spot neither right in the front of the room nor way in back of it. Lowering myself onto the mat as gracefully as possible, I scanned the room for familiar faces. The weekend class was definitely more crowded, and drew a new, if not demographically different, crowd. I saw a redheaded woman, pregnant with twins, who I knew from the weekday classes, and we exchanged smiles.

Wondering who among these women was my yoga poster, I began a second around-the-room scan, aiming to telegraph the words “hi, you recommended the class to me on Citybaby” with a small hopeful smile.

I made it as far as the doorway when my little smile fell. There was Courtney, fellow preggo and wife of my platonic childhood friend Matthew, who hated me for no explicable reason other than the aforementioned platonic friendship with her husband. Apparently, she took this class.

“Oh, hi Eve,” she said, clearly as bummed as I was to find out that we were to share the same coffee klatch. “I didn’t realize you took this class.”

“I usually come on weekdays,” I told her, readjusting myself on the mat.

Courtney took a spot halfway across the room, but I could still feel her negative presence. One thing was certain: Having Courtney at prenatal yoga destroyed the whole mellow vibe. Yoga poster or not, from now on, I’d be sticking to weekdays.

The Brooklyn Chronicles, a work of fiction, appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.