Then it hit me: a set of awesomely long, cherry red nails would be just the ticket. I could fan the fakes over the cover of my book while purring about its contents. No one would notice any stammering or stumbling, they’d just say to themselves, Grandma, what big nails you have!
I showed up at the nail salon a few minutes early, surprised to see four other women sitting on floral slipper chairs and discussing their weekly manicures. Like any good redneck, I always thought you only got fake nails if you were getting married that afternoon.
A couple of hours later, I left wearing my new, magnificent talons, the kind where you drum them on purpose just to hear their lovely click-click, like a poodle on Pergo.
The nails did their job. I sailed through the TV interview waving my hands wildly as if conducting an imaginary symphony and slapping my cheeks a lot, Home Alone style. This seemed to confuse the host but who cared? The more confused he looked, the more I flapped and fanned.
The next few weeks, I realized I might have a problem. See, I’d never intended to keep going back to the nail salon but these beauties were as addictive as crack. Every time I sat in my slipper chair and presented my nails to Allison, I would try to form the words: “Just dissolve these and put some clear on my real nails” but instead, it came out as “Don’t you think my pinkies could use some length?”
They say that Barbra Streisand is so nail-obsessed that she gets manicures twice a day. Hey, if you want to see somebody with a problem, look no further than Babs.
I mean it’s not as if I can’t quit anytime I want to. It’s not like it’s hurting anybody else, right? The more I think about it, it’s not like I really have a problem. Maybe you all are the ones with the problem. Man.
It could be much worse.
Have you heard about people who are so beauty obsessed they go to Botox parties in their friends’ homes?
Pampered Chef ? See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya. Tupperware? You’re just so Flock of Seagulls. This is the new millennium! Trot over to your friend’s house for some Botox in the butt-ocks, or wherever you think could use a little wrinkle removal.
Botox parties are all the rage since the FDA (motto: “AIDS, hell! Isn’t that a frowny-face line on your forehead?”) gave its official okie-dokie to the cosmetic use of the toxin. Nowadays, plastic surgeons show up at these home parties toting boxes of Botox in their little black bags. It’s not exactly the prairie house call for smallpox, is it? Then again, who knew it was this easy to get a doctor to make a house call? I’ll just lure him over for an eyebrow lift and then hit him up for something for this wet, hacking cough.
This is starting to make my manicure addiction seem kind of tame, isn’t it? Lucky for me, Botox parties are still more of a big-city thing, just huge in New York and L.A., where guests sip Champagne and eat caviar while they wait for injections that cost several hundred bucks. It’s probably cheaper down South.
How hard can it be to make botulin toxin anyway? Isn’t that the same stuff we were always warned would kill us if we ate a chicken salad sandwich that had set out in the sun too long? (As a child, this was drilled into me by elderly aunts who convinced me that a single bite of poorly preserved potato salad at a picnic would cause “death and permanent injury.”) So here’s my question: Can I duplicate the Botox injections by simply falling asleep on the beach with some deviled eggs on my forehead?
The downside to Botox is that it works by paralyzing the muscles under your skin. So, while on the inside you may be fairly bursting with joy, your face won’t show it. (“I’m so happy to see you. No. Really, I am. I’ve never been this happy in my entire life, can’t you tell? You can’t? Oh, now I’m upset. No, I am furious! You can’t tell?”)
As you might expect, there are naysayers in the med ical community. One prominent medical ethicist said the whole notion of informed consent “doesn’t have the same meaning when it’s in the context of wine and cheese.”
I say lighten up and have some pinot grigio and a chemical peel. To tell the truth, hons, I’m not all that interested in Botox, but I do believe this could lead to a much higher calling, say, liposuction bachelorette parties or boob jobs during the neighborhood potluck.
Hey, the docs have spoken: if you billed it, they will come.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered a little facial work, particularly right before my twenty-fifth high school reunion.
Allow me to set the stage. I had the perfect little black dress, f-me heels, a fab new “har” do, as we say in the South, my nails (natch!), and, hmmmm, let’s see, what else? Oh yes! Pinkeye! A raging case in both eyes. I looked like a very chic possum.
A lesser woman would have come unglued by this development which, and this is the God’s truth, occurred precisely forty-five minutes before the party.
“Well,” I said, swirling about my husband. “What do you think?”
“What’s wrong with your eyes? They look kinda, uh, weird.”
Five minutes later, I was cursing the fact that I was married to a rock star instead of an ophthalmologist. (Sorry, just practicing. That was going to be the harmless little white lie for the night.)
There’s just something so undignified about a practically middle-aged woman with pinkeye. I toyed with wearing sunglasses all night but this would have just led to far-flung rumors that I had some kind of drug problem, what with the hubby’s business and all. I decided to tough it out and went bravely into the night armed with useless Visine and lots of Kleenex. At first, everyone assumed I was overcome with emotion at seeing so many old (very old) friends, tears streaming down my face.
The fact that half the room thought I was having some kind of emotional breakdown wasn’t lost on me. This was almost more embarrassing than the pinkeye, which, by the time the DJ cranked up YMCA (unavoidable), had turned into a crusty mess that had effectively glued my eyes shut!!!
An old boyfriend who dumped me in high school wandered over wearing a comb-over and gnawing a buffalo wing. I bolted before he could ask why I appeared to be praying during the macarena (also unavoidable) and the chicken dance (Valley o’ Death Nursing Home, here I come!). I couldn’t help but notice that our nonconformist hippiefied class of ’74 was depressingly good at the electric slide, which, for reasons I don’t really get, is subtitled “It’s electric!” which is one of those Department of Redundancy Department things.
When I returned from the dance floor, dinner was served and I was seated beside a classmate who introduced me to her husband.
“What do you do?” I small-talked.
“I’m a race car driver,” he said.
I howled at this and elbowed my hubby hard in the ribs. “Right!” I shrieked. “And this guy’s really a rock star!”
There was an awkward silence (you know it really is true that when you lose one sense your other senses get much sharper) until someone hissed at me, “He really is a race car driver, Celia.”
Ooops. Well, hell. It’s not as if I could see. With my eyes mostly glued shut like this, he didn’t look much different from the overdone prime rib with apple ring garnish on my plate.
I went home feeling dowdy and decidedly unbeautiful. All my life, I’ve been short, plump, and the kind of woman that other women don’t mind talking to their husbands. “More cute than pretty” as one old boyfriend once said, meaning it nicely but making me feel like somebody’s new speckled puppy.
As a little girl, and to this day, actually, I always watch the Miss America Pageant on TV because it’s such a beautiful fantasy. The pageant has been on my mind a lot because, this year, my home state actually has two contestants fighting to represent North Carolina.
Sure, one of them is only hanging on by a hand-beaded metallic thread but that’s just because her meanie of an ex-boyfriend tattled that he had nude pictures of her. The other Miss North Carolina, who is fortunate not to have any such scoundrel in her past, is not as pretty.
I know looks shouldn’t matter because of it being the Miss America Virgin Schol
arship Pageant and all, but you know as well as I that nobody really believes you’d ever see a finalist with back hair or dimply thighs. (Although there was that Miss Alaska that one time…)
The nudie Miss North Carolina is flat-out better looking than the sincere-suited first runner-up who is hell-bent to take the crown. The runner-up is not unattractive, but she is a pale, wan little thing you’d take home to mama and certain presidency of the Junior League. The pretty one, on the other hand, has the kind of looks that pageant judges usually term “the potential for explosive hot monkey love.”
So the two Miss North Carolinas are still fighting in court instead of a nice Pay-Per-View ring match at Bally’s, like God intended. Hey, it’s no worse than trotting them out like prize sows in sequins.
For the record, I don’t buy nudie Miss N.C.’s claim that cad boy secretly snapped topless pictures of her in a dressing room and, if you do, perhaps you’d like to invest in my new pixie dust and fairy wings dotcom opportunity.
Not long ago, I read where the eighty-one-year-old Miss America Pageant’s governing body (which is, I’m guessing, 40-23-34) has decided to “punch up the drama” a bit. They’re no doubt weary of trying to say things like “We’re looking at the inner beauty of the contestant” without milk coming out of their noses.
Inspired by the success of TV’s Survivor, the Miss America Pageant will now allow those who didn’t make it to the Top 10 (a.k.a. the rat-faced losers) to vote for the finalist they like best. Their votes will carry just as much weight as those of the pageant’s prestigious judges, typically a Vegas lounge comic, long-distance spokesman Carrot Top, and the woman who invented the hair-removal goo Nads.
This should keep the girls on best behavior. Because I’ve never been classically beautiful, I have to tell you that I’m excited about this. If we’re insanely lucky, maybe there will even be a Survivor-style snake-and-rat speech by one of the embittered forty, who has fled outside the convention hall and is eating chicken straight from the bucket.
As if that’s not enough, my fellow beauty junkies, the Miss America Pageant has also announced that it will forgo the interview segment in which finalists pledge to promote world peace, end hunger, and fight for dress sizes that don’t lie. In its place? Five current-events questions with points deducted for incorrect answers. (“No, no, Miss Texas, the Surgeon General of the United States is not ‘the guy who comes on Oprah every Tuesday.’ ”)
The talent portion of the pageant, apparently in an effort not to offend any contestant who doesn’t actually have any, has been renamed Artistic Expression.
I’ll never stop watching the Miss America Pageant. I’m especially happy that they’ve cut back on the song-and-dance routines in which some aging white guy tries to busta move (more likely a hip) while leering at the scantily clad nineteen-year-old contestants who must bat their eyes and look captivated by him. Sounds like intern-recruitment day at the Capitol, doesn’t it?
And I’ll never stop dreaming about being “more pretty than cute.” It won’t be long before the next class reunion. Tummy tuck, anyone?
3
MOTHER’S DAY
Memories
Make Mine Macaroni
My earliest memory of making a handmade Mother’s Day present was when I was six years old and in the first grade. Today, the gift I made back in 1963 would strike most people as a cross between repulsive and hilarious: I, along with twenty-eight classmates, lovingly pasted photographs of ourselves onto pink construction paper, then glued the paper, faceup, to the bottom of a large glass ashtray provided by our teacher.
On Mother’s Day 1963, all over Wallace, North Carolina, moms of first-graders joyously opened their personalized ashtrays and, a short while later, proudly flicked the ashes from their Kents and Bel-Airs right onto our little glass-protected faces.
There we would be for years to come, captured in black-and-white, mostly toothless and T-shirted, smiling up at our moms through a face full of butts.
Today, of course, this would never happen. Ashtrays are as un-PC as candy cigarettes.
The next Mother’s Day gift I remember making began with a heavy-duty paper plate that a responsible grown-up had spray-painted silver. My task was to glue glitter-soaked elbow macaroni all the way around the plate, then, using a yellow pipe cleaner, attach a wad of plastic purple grapes from the Ben Franklin store to the center of the plate. It was a vision. And it is a testimony to my mother that this work of art hung on our living room wall until long after I had finished high school, the elbows carefully dusted once a week.
As I write this, my four-year-old daughter is at her friend’s house making my Mother’s Day gift.
Seeing her excitement about this top-secret project shamed me as I realized that I had spent two days quietly huffing about having to buy something for my mother and mother-in-law. Not because they don’t deserve gifts, but because I had waited until the last minute and that meant a robe and slippers or maybe a purse or perfume.
Knowing that my daughter had planned, perhaps for weeks, to surprise me with what will probably involve colored feathers, small pebbles she has been picking up in the alley beside our house, and her beloved sequins, made me sad that I hadn’t been just as excited.
As corny as it sounds, my proudest possession on earth is last year’s Mother’s Day present, a silver box from Eckerd Drugs, which my daughter secretly decorated with blue, yellow, and pink pony beads and a snowstorm of glitter. It holds every piece of jewelry I own. And it always will.
I am fairly certain neither my mother nor my mother-in-law would like a photographic ashtray, but it pains me that I ended up putting so little thought into their gifts. Grab it. Get it wrapped. Get it mailed. Mark it off the list.
Will they like their gifts? Of course. Will they be so moved that their throats close up a little when they see what’s inside this box wrapped by some other woman’s daughter at the store’s customer service counter? Probably not.
I resolve to do better next time, to recapture some of the macaroni magic, if just for old time’s sake. I am not a crafty person and marvel at the mom at my daughter’s ballet class who spends our thirty-minute wait in the hallway explaining how she uses wet tea bags to age linen and make elegant picture frames.
It’s unfortunate, but she is simply too nice to hate.
So the macaroni magic will not be craft induced for me. Maybe not for you either. It can be simply sitting and talking under the sycamore tree in the backyard of the home you grew up in.
One day, it will be my daughter who will be scowling in line at the gift-wrap counter, and she will have long forgotten a sunny May afternoon when she was four and so excited about her Mother’s Day project that she couldn’t even sleep the night before.
That’s life. I know it. And I know something more: that on those long days when we in the sandwich generation feel squeezed and spent and are tempted to grouse about being either mother or daughter, we should be fall-on-our-knees grateful to be both.
Because the truth is simple. Our time is fleeting and dear. As a good friend explained it, one day it is our mother who is buying us the Chatty Cathy that we begged for; the next, or so it seems, we find ourselves taking a baby doll as a gift to a mother in the nursing home. It has always struck me that women in nursing home beds almost always have baby dolls in their rooms. I suspect it is because they remind them of the happiest time of their lives. I know it is mine.
One day, in a hospital room somewhere, you will hold a hand that you can’t even recognize anymore. It may be thin and dry and tiny, the rings way too big even with the guards you bought for her at the jewelry store.
Look closer and you’ll recognize the hand that pushed you in the swing, the one that felt your burning forehead when you were sick, the one that stroked your hair the first time you had your heart broken and cried for a solid three hours.
For all of you mothers, for all of you who want to be mothers, for all of you “other mothers” who nurture childr
en not your own, may you have a lifetime of Mother’s Days filled with your own brand of macaroni magic.
I plan to.
4
“WHAT WE HAVIN’ FOR DINNER TONIGHT,
Sugar Booger?”
And Other Wildly Important Uses for the Cell Phone
I haven’t weighed in on the cell phone debate because I own one and, frankly, whining about others who use them seems hypocritical even by humor-columnist standards, which are pretty lax, by the way.
But all that has changed. My phone will soon be returned to the apostate of hell, er, sales clerk who sold it to me, along with the shredded remnants of the (ha-ha) contract that guaranteed the roaming rates wouldn’t go up for a year. Once, I tried to complain about my bill, which had mysteriously doubled, and was told to wait in a special line. The line that never moves. How long was my wait? Let’s just say that Vice President Dick “I’m with Stupid” Cheney could’ve had a couple of dozen heart attacks in less time than it took me to work my way to the head of the line.
(And, politics aside, you gotta respect a guy who can have an angioplasty or two before breakfast and be back at his desk before the big guy has dipped his pinkie toe in the Rose Garden lap pool and polished off his power muffin.)
Before I began to hate my cell phone provider, my husband asked his niece to program the phone to play, quite loudly, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He did this because, at age twelve, she already knows more about cell phones than anyone we know. Lucy even programmed my name to flash on the screen, apparently in case I ever forget who the hell I am.
She told me that I could play cool games on my cell phone but I told her that probably won’t ever happen since it takes three separate pairs of glasses just to be able to find the redial button.
Cell phones are great for emergencies but they are maddening when used for stupid stuff.
We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier Page 11