Yes, dear readers, I do know it has been about 47 years since my last blog post. (Actually, it's been about 6 months.) However, in the interim, something rather strange happened - I got a life.
A few days before my last post, the most absolutely fabulous fellow found me frolicking on Facebook. (That's for all of my alliterative afficionados!) Long story short, my high school crush decided to hunt me down, turned out to be every bit as delicious as I always thought he would be, and 6 months later we're engaged to be married. Yay!
Now what, you might ask, does this have to do with Manis (as in "manicures" for short), etc? Everything.
My 39th birthday is rumored to have occurred last week (I'm still refusing to formally acknowledge it), and my darling mother sent me a little cash with which to fund the manicure I desperately needed before I would be willing to dare take a picture of the gorgeous rock on my finger, to share with the family. So the children and I made the trek to our favorite salon, just to find that our favorite Chinese family actually had the audacity to take their one-day-every-decade vacation exactly when I needed them most! I was absolutely appalled.
But not to be beaten, I marched over to Wal-Mart to visit their competition. Let me just spoil the outcome of this story by saying that is one mistake I will NEVER make again.
First, I am not generally a nail-doing kind of girl. I get my nails done maybe once or twice a year, for very special occasions. On those rare occasions, I (almost) always go see Amy and Scott at LA Nails, whose English leaves a lot to the imagination, but who psychically always seem to know exactly what I want. I say this, having only just come to appreciate their particular gifts, upon realizing that not all Asian nail-doing types have this ability.
For instance, when I walked into the Wal-Mart salon, the rather suspicious looking Asian man behind the surgical mask called out, "I hewp zhoo?" To which I enthusiastically replied, "Mani and pedi for me... just the nails for my daughter..." who dutifully held up her well-chewed fingertips, and promptly got a set of lovely acrylic nails, which were painted in bright red, looking as though they had been painted by a 96 year old half-blind stroke victim with Parkinson's disease.
This fiasco was taking place while I was silently enduring the ice pick and sledge hammer on the bottoms of my feet, under the guise of receiving a pedicure. As always, I reminded myself that I would endure all for beauty, and besides, I couldnt' wait to see how my toes would look when dotted with a color called "I'm not really a waitress" - the most gorgeous metallic red I could imagine.
For the most part, the pedicure was uneventful, if unreasonably painful, as the woman cut one of my big toe nails down to the very quick, and then tried to cover up for this mistake by painting the end of my foot. This would end up being the least of my troubles, though.
After the pedicure, I was directed to the table, where I was left to soak my fingertips, with their nubby little nails, in some rather tingly, garlic-smelling sauce. Then I had a hand-massage administered by a tiny little Chinese sadist, who amused herself by seeing how many bones she could crack in 30 seconds or less. I should probably have been clued in by the green, curling dragon claws she called her own toenails, that perhaps she was one fortune cookie short of a Happy Meal, but I just kept thinking "endure all for beauty!!"
After a few minutes of soaking and bruising, she said to me, "Why you wan nail done?" pointing at my ring. "You get merry?" And I responded that yes, I was getting married, and decided to get acrylic nails to hide my ugly natural ones for the picture of my engagement ring. She then slapped the table so hard my teeth rattled, and her bowl of stingy garlic juice went everywhere. "You wan a fake a nail? Why you say mani when you wan fake a nail?" She then slapped my hands with a towel and shoved me toward the creepy guy behind the surgical mask, who continued to berate me in his barely intelligible English, somehow getting across the point that I had asked for one thing, when apparently I wanted something different.
I have to say... this greasy guy was just waiting for the folks from Immigration and Naturalization to come in for a pedicure. He kept looking at the doorway with these shifty eyes, over his mask, and he about had a stroke when I found his nail salon technician certificate behind the shelf of nail bottles on the table, and I pulled it up to compare his picture to his actual face, and realized they were NOT the same fella.
He then proceeded to slather about 4 feet of acrylic on each nail, until I ended up with a set of totally square, absolutely indestructible semi-French claws. I say semi-French, because the original idea was French, I'm sure, but I'm pretty sure that the original French tips did not start in the center of the nail bed, so they'd be an inch long. I'm sure they also were intended to have some uniformity of shape which in no way corresponds to the Piccaso-esque fiasco which is currently represented on the tips of my fingers.
To add insult to injury, though, was the cost. The sign posted at the doorway said that they charged $20 for a pedicure and $12 for a manicure. However, my total bill came to $70 - and the creepy guy added an $8 tip to the receipt AFTER I left.
So...was this venture a learning experience? Yes. I now know the difference between asking for a manicure and a "full set." And I also know the difference between an illegal hack, and a real nail technician. Next time I go to see Scott and Amy, I'm going to give them a big tip... and assure them that they need not worry about losing business to the folks down the sidewalk at Wal-Mart.
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