Looking for a last-minute hostess gift for a holiday party? Well, you’ve come to the wrong place, because I will advise you to buy a box of chocolate-covered cherries and bring them to my house. Bring some wine, too. Screw holiday parties.
Morgan, my fabulous sister from Fabulous-port, was grocery shopping with me the other day when we spotted something curious at the cash register.
“Look,” I said, “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans.” They appeared to be a Harry Potter product. I don’t know my Harry Potter from the hole in my butt, because I read the first one and ran back to Dahl and Tolkien as fast as my brain’s tiny legs could carry it. (Don’t email me about how great HP is. I am jus’ jelus. I do wish I could write something so commercially pleasing so I too could feather my bed with G-notes. There, I said it.)
This prompted the cashier to immediately jump in: “Oh, yeah, those are awful. We tried them here. Sardine, soap, ugh.” This sounded like a challenge to me.
The Scene: The bathroom. For some reason 7th Heaven is playing in the background and the actress who plays Lucy is whining, a major stretch for her as an actress. There is blood. There is screaming. There is a strip of paper with some sticky stuff and a bunch of hair stuck to it on the ground.
Perhaps I should back up a bit. Today I decided it would be really neat to buy one of those home-waxing kits so I could become one of those hairless freaks that you see on the MTV.
I am wearing something sleeveless to the Big Party and I thought it would be a kick to rip out all my armpit hairs at once. Bam! The teeny Vietnamese lady who did my nails a couple of times showed me her legs and said that every time she has them done, less and less hair grows back. Hmm. It got me to thinking.
I went to Fred Meyer, ostensibly to buy some chapstick. The hair-removal aisle pulled me like Demi “Midlife Crisis” Moore to some barely-legal boy candy. “Sugar wax! That sounds good.” My stupid brain told my stupid hand to pull it off the shelf. I shunned Nad’s and that creepy new Veet stuff in order to go with a classic: Nair. “Heat in the microwave!” exclaimed the package. “Three easy steps!” The smiling hairless woman on the box gazed at me knowingly.
“But I like your armpit hair,” said Mr. Husband, as he put Frannie’s shoes on.
“Mmmph,” I said.
“Just so you know.”
“See you,” I said, and closed the door behind them. Damn him and his supportive, accepting attitude. I had crossed a line and couldn’t go back now.
So tonight, with the house to myself, I went to work. I opened the box and it had a giant roller bottle full of brown goo, with fragrance added to it. I don’t see why it needed fragrance; it’s made of sugar, and doesn’t that smell good on its own? There were some paper strips and some little wipes that you wipe yourself with first to get all the oil off your skin, because then it works better, I guess. I skipped that part.
The directions said that the “hair should be more than 1/4 of an inch, but less than 1/2 of an inch.” Hey! Math? All the sudden this was getting hard! I went into the bathroom and trimmed my armpit hair over the sink, not an easy task.
I hate looking at myself in the mirror without a shirt on and wearing pants. I think I look all goony that way, especially with one arm up in the air and my poor little armpit with its new bad haircut. And men look goony with just a shirt on and no pants. What up with that?
Now that I had the desirable 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch length, it was time to heat the goo in the microwave. “Full bottle: 15 seconds. Wax should be as warm as comfortably-hot bathwater.” I got that done, then I had to squeeze it down to the “easy roller tip” that you use to smear it on your chosen manlike body part.
The packaging says it is “easy and neat” but it’s really not because you have to roll it around with your finger to get the goo all over the roller. It was at this point that I was starting to realize what the fragrance smelled like: Boy. It was manny, like boy deodorant. That’s weird.
So I put it on my least favorite armpit first, the left one, and the rolling itself painfully tugged my doomed hairs. At last I was coated in goo. The illustrated directions showed a hand ripping the strip off and a hand holding the skin taut next to the line drawing of an armpit. But I only had one hand free, the ripping hand! The other hand was attached to the arm that was attached to the victim armpit! What to do? Rip anyhow, I guess.
YOINK! I actually saw stars for a second, and then I remembered to start breathing again. Damn, dude. Like four hairs came out, and you bet your pimp juice I have more than four armpit hairs. I put my arm down to take a break…and it got stuck to my side. Fuckity! This was not crapping going well.
I always like to Make Matters Worse, so I ripped a few more times. More hair came out, but I am certainly not ready for the MTV. Or even MuchMusic. Now blood was rising to the surface. It was like I was giving myself some kind of awkward hickey.
I decided to switch to my upper lip, which is not super manlike, but I figure it could be improved. That worked marginally better, but now all I can smell under my nose on my freakishly feminine lip is man-smell. Those people over at Nair have got quite the sense of humor. I salute them.
Now I have a swollen, itchy, smelly, hickey-fied armpit, and a normal armpit with trimmed pit hairs that are short n scratchy. And an upper lip that looks okay.
I should have just thrown my seven dollars off a bridge, and hit myself with a flyswatter for about an hour. Same damn results.
What I should do now, and what I should have done in the first place, is make myself a pan of crappity fucking rice krispie treets, and eat them all before Mr. Supportive Modern Guy Who Will Secretly Laugh Up His Sleeve at Me comes home.