gettin' girlie

Anyone who knows me knows that I am NOT a girlie girl.  I don’t wear make-up, don’t even own any.  I don’t mess with my hair, it’s wash and towel dry.  I don’t wear jewelry unless I am going out or obsess over clothes and I don’t understand the fascination with shoes.  I keep my nails very short because they get in the way of my work and in fact have never had a manicure or pedicure, that is until last Saturday.

We drove to Dallas last Friday for a family wedding and stayed with my sister-in-law and her husband.  She was going to get a manicure and pedicure for the event and offered to treat me to the same for my birthday.  That would be nice, I thought since my nails are a train wreck, so off we went.

Oh my gosh!  The first thing when we walked in, they asked us to pick out the color we wanted.  Color?  I don’t do that, I was thinking it would just be nice to get my cuticles trimmed up and besides, there were about 200 colors to choose from.  Well, why not I thought and finally settled on a purple since the skirt I was going to wear had that color in it and when I do wear shoes they are mostly open toe sandal type.  So I’ve got my little bottle of fingernail polish clutched in my hand and they take us over to the station.

The station is a massage chair with a basin of hot water for my feet and as I am settling in, they hand me the menu for the pedicure.  Pick whatever you want, my s-i-l says so, what the heck, I might as well go for it, and pick the deluxe and she decides to get it also.  The chairs are pounding and thumping and rolling around on our backs while the young asian women attend to our toes, filing, scraping, trimming, clipping, rubbing all kinds of stuff in our toes and feet.  They work on the calluses and move up the legs rubbing all manner of things, oils and lotions and exfoliants, into our legs and massaging everything from knee to toes.  Then comes the juice of grapefruits, lemons and oranges that they rub in and then more lotions and then they wrapped our legs from knee down in hot towels and already I’ve decided that by the time they finish I’m not going to be able to walk out of there.  

While all this is going on, another attendant is working on my fingernails with the same soaking, trimming, scraping, shaping, buffing and massaging our hands and arms up to the elbows.  I declined the french nails and color on my fingernails as they are extremely short and because of the work I do it would get messed up fast and be a waste so they put on a clear coat.  My nails have not looked this good ever!

Back to my feet, the hot towels come off, more lotion is applied and then they bring out the hot rocks which they proceed to rub up and down our legs and feet and then more lotions.  Finally, they apply the color and Lisa talks me into getting a design on my big toenail so I opt for a flower with a little rhinestone.  I can’t believe this is me.  Before it is all over with, they have talked me into an eyebrow and upper lip wax.  Yeouch!  But I gotta say, my eyebrows look fabulous.  Finally we’re all done and wobbly legged make our way to the car.  I called my daughter right away because she is absolutely not going to believe this.  She’s laughing her ass off and hangs up with, ‘I’m calling my brother right now’.

Ya know, I could get used to this.  Who knew there was a girlie girl hiding in me all this time.  Maybe next time, I’ll even go shoe shopping!