EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE: DESTINATION,BEAUTY

AS I LIVE ON THE WEST SIDE of Manhattan, it figures that all my doctors on the East Side. Both Sides have beauty salons: tons of them. I now and again treat myself to an East Side manicure and pedicure if I have two docs visits in one day, a fun-filling in the sandwich of doctors' visits.

YESTERDAY I happened upon a salon that did not look too busy, but also looked as if it were crowded at times, staffed as it was by a bevy of good-looking Asians. Both women and men. The addition of men to rank of beauty shop operators is recent on the West Side also. Yesterday was surpassingly dreadful weather: fierce rain and out-of-season cold."My" salon was huge. Its walls were that expensively pale puce one sees on the walls of chocolate emporia. Tons of high-end plastic greenery: rows of tiny topiaries, a street window full of what looked like bamboo implausibly bearing peachoid fruit. There was soft meditative music. Think temple bells. I had a fleeting thought that it was going to cost about twice what it cost on the West Side, but I didn't care. I was overcome with Soft Fuzziness.

A SMALL cluster of these pretty people helped me get out of my soaking coat and my purple-laced sneakers. "Choose your color polish! Take your time! Not busy." They smiled a lot. Mike gave me a pedicure , tickling foot-soles with pumice, massaging toes, then, legs. then the hot-pink polish I had chosen. I noticed, sitting high on that pedicure throne, that salon decorations included a Christian cross, delineated with --fluorescents? neon? And on the wall, above the blue light of the sterilizing oven, a little box like the TV on the nether side of a taxi's front seat. No sound, but scrolls of movie gossip, of Today's Famous Birthdays (yesterday happened to be Bill Gates'), advertisements for the salon " HAVE BEAUTY PARTY HERE!" and self-answering quizzes "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TOM JONES?"After the manicure, Mike massaged my shoulders as I sat with my finger nails drying under one lamp and my toenails under another. I tipped him well.

COST? Yes, readers, it was exactly twice what it would have been on the West Side.

LOCATION LOCATION

If all you have around to eat for lunch is an eighth of an inch of petrified peanut butter, a pair of congealed anchovies, a box of green jello with a ten-year-old sell-by date, what do you do?  If you live in the Big City (as do I) you take a short walk to your favorite diner, your idealized diner, that perfect diner! If you are suburban or rural, there is no help for it:  you will have to take that short drive to the Mall, but in that case ,writers anyway, beware!  The bargain aisles in Malls, I have discovered, are far more seductive than the banks and shoe repair places you may pass in the Big City on your way to THE diner. Writing is an Alternate State, as we all know.  You must halfway- stay in that fragile bubble whilst you have your first cuppa, chomp that lettuce, creatively eavesdrop...

A Diner of One's Own

CHOICE OF DINER IS PARAMOUNT. Not only must it own the right mix of fresh egg salad on 7-grain, OK height of table relative to chair, i.e., you don't have to lift your elbows unnaturally high, natural light not obscured by macrame with trailing spider plant and it must have

interesting mix of patrons. Variety is the essence of overheard conversation.  Think hockey moms plus employees on lunch break from same large office (think hospital) plus high schoolers (especially sophomores) plus pickup time from neighborhood pre-school (think mommies, nannies, 4-year-olds). 

What this is

Between the sandwich and chocolate mousse pie there's enough time to write a novel, but I never do. I free associate instead. I travel with a notebook. It looks more like a shopping list when you get back to it rather than notes for a novel... 

Sometimes I make near rhyme lists hoping I'll find a subject that goes with them. I'll post one soon.