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.
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1 comment:
And worth every penny, clearly.
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