a day at the spa

as a woman that was never blessed with physical beauty, it has taken me a long time to stop wishing that one day i would wake up "angelina" and to instead adopt my own three-step philosophy towards temporal beauty that goes as follows:

1) you can't change what God gave you. all you can do is keep it clean, trim, and smelling nice.
2) as long as you do not set dogs to barking nor children to screaming, and no villagers come after you with pitchforks and torches, be happy with the way you look
and most important of all....
3) no hair below the nose

now, while i firmly believe that women should be pretty, soft and sweet-smelling, my beauty philosophy gets to be more and more difficult a mandate to fulfil the older i get: my face is cultivating so many "character lines" that i am starting to look like a street map of montreal, my breast have developed an intense yearning to become better acquainted with my hips, and as far as i can tell, my bottom is most definately not where i left it when i was 21.

i now shop for beauty products at not at the department store, but at the hardware store. all-natural green-tea and wheatgerm extract, retinol based vitamin-e antioxidant microdermabrasion intensif overnight multi-care deep wrinkle filler serums with infused oxygen and an spf 392 no longer cut it for me.

i have moved on to polyfilla. spackle has become my "secret beauty weapon"

so, in what looks to soon become a full time job, i treated myself yesterday to "a day at the spa" to recover from the damage that a week and sixty children can do to a woman already teetering on one of the outer branches of the ugly tree.

let me tell you, the prisoners in guantanamo bay have it easy.

my aesthetician is a tiny little vietnamese lady with whom i have been friends for over seven years. she alone understands my dark and terrible secrets: that if i do not visit her faithfully and regularly, i hair over like a wookie; my lush, chestnut locks soon develop demented grey highlights that make me look like pepe le pew; and that if my feet were not on the far end of my body their proximity to me would leave me emotionally scarred for years to come.

joanne is a puzzle: quiet and demure, sweet and good natured with an easy laugh, she has the ability to inflict pain that defies the strictures imposed by the geneva convention. secretly, i am convinced that joanne was trained as an aesthetician by the viet cong, and did her apprenticeship at abu ghraib. tomas a torqumada, the father of the spanish inquisition, would have put her name in for canonization. i believe she may be keeper of ceausescu's securitate handbook.

in joanne's tiny hands, i'd confess to anything: where the bodies are, my communist upbringing; that i once voted for bo bice.

in joanne's dungeon... i mean "day spa", i am soaked, scrubbed, scraped, filed, pumiced, plucked, depilated, defoliated and covered in acrylic. her main instruments of beauty are a dremel tool, a rotary sandpaper drill bit and boiling wax. and i am pretty sure her facial treatments include napalm.

for hours i am subjected to the most hideous tortures, the most painful regimes and the most invasive and embarrasing applications of hot wax (note to self: *NEVER AGAIN request the 'telly savalas'*) and - to cap it all off - i PAY her for the privilege.

and do you know what the absolute WORST part of it all is????

it doesn't do a damn bit of good.....