'The Wax'.
My night began as any other normal weekday night. I came home from
work, fixed dinner for my daughter and we played for a while. I then had the
thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next couple
hours: maybe I should use that wax in my medicine cabinet.
I set up my kid with a video and head to the site of my demise, um, I
mean bathroom. It was one of those cold wax kits. No melting a
clump of hot wax, you just rub the clear strips in your hand, peel them
apart, press it on your leg (or wherever) and ignore the frantically
rising crescendo of string instruments in the background. No muss, no
fuss. How hard can this be? I mean, I'm not the girly-est of girls but
I'm mechanically inclined so maybe I can figure out how this
works..........................You'd think.
So I pull one of the thin strips out. It's two strips facing each
other, stuck together. I'm supposed to rub it in my hand to warm and
soften the wax (I'm guessing). I go one better: I pull out the
hair dryer and heat the SOB to ten thousand degrees. Cold wax, my azz.
(Oh, how that phrase will come back to haunt me.) I lay the strip across
my thigh. I hold the skin around it and pull. OK, so it wasn't the best
feeling in the world, but it wasn't bad. I can do this! Hair removal
no longer eludes me!
I am Sheera, fighter of all wayward body hair and smooth skin
extraordinaire!
With my next wax strip, I move north.
After checking on the girl and verifying that she was, in fact, becoming
one with Bear and learning all about smells, I sneak into the bathroom
for The Ultimate Hair Fighting Championship. I drop my panties and
place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I then apply the
wax strip across the right side on my bikini line, covering the right
half of my vagina and stretching up into the inside of the right butt
cheek. (Yeah,it was a long strip.) I inhale deeply. I brace myself.
RRRIIIIPPP!!!!
I'm blind! Blind from the pain! Vision returning. Oh crap. I've only managed to
pull off half an inch of the strip. Another deep breath. And RIIIP!
Everything is swirly and tie-dyed? Do I hear crashing drums? OK,
coming back to normal again. I want to see my trophy - my wax covered
pelt that caused me so much agony. I want to revel in the glory that
is my triumph over body hair. I hold the wax strip like an Olympic gold
medallist.
But why is there no hair on it? Why is the wax mostly gone? Where
could the wax go, if not on the strip? Slowly, I eased my head down, my
foot still perched on the toilet. I see hair - the hair that should be
on the strip. I touch. I feel. I am touching wax. I look to the
ceiling and silently shout "nooooooo!!" And realize I have just begun
living my own personal version of "The Tar Baby."
I peel my fingers off the softest, most sensitive part of my body that
is now covered in cold wax and matted hair, and make the next big
mistake - up until this point, you'll remember, I've had my foot on the
toilet. I know I need to move, to do something. So I put my foot down
on the floor. And then I hear the slamming of the cell door.
Vagina? Sealed shut.
Butt? Sealed shut.
A little voice in my head says "I hope you don't have to potty anytime
soon. Your head just might pop off." I penguin walk around the bathroom
trying desperately to figure out what I should do next. Hot water!
Hot water melts wax! I'll run the hottest water I can stand and get in -
the wax should melt and I can gently wipe it away, right? Wrong. I
get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than is used to torture
prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment. And I sit.
Now the only thing worse than having your goodies glued together is
having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of a tub. In
scalding hot water. Which, by the way, does not melt the cold wax. So
now I'm stuck to the tub.
I call my friend, Mary, because she once dropped out of beauty school so
surely she has some secret knowledge or trick to get wax off skin. It's
never good to start a conversation with "So my nether regions are stuck
to the tub." She doesn't have a trick. She does her best to suppress
laughter.
She wants to know exactly where the wax is on the butt - "Are we talking
cheek or hole, here?" she asks. She isn't even trying to hide the
giggles now.
I give her the run-down of the entire night. She tells me to call the
number on the side of the box, but to have a good cover story for where
the wax actually is. "You know that if we were working the help line at
XX Wax Co. and somebody called with their entire crack sealed shut we'd
just put them on hold then record the conversation for everyone we know.
You're going to end up on a radio show or the internet if you tell them
the truth.
"While we go through various solutions, I have resorted to scraping the
wax off with a razor. Boy, nothing feels better to the girly goodies
than covering them in wax, sticking them to a tub in super hot water and
THEN dry shaving the sticky wax off!
In the middle of the conversation (which has inexplicably turned to
other subjects!) I find the little, beautiful saving grace that is the
lotion provided with wax to remove the excess. I rub some in and start
screaming "It's working! It's working!" I get hearty congratulations
from Mary and we hang up.
I successfully remove all the wax and notice, to my dismay, that the
hair is still there. So I shaved the damned stuff off. Hell, I was
numb by that point anyway. And then I put the box of wax back in my
medicine cabinet. Never know when a moustache might start to come in.
Tonight, I attempt hair dying
oh god
