Body Shop

The Heartbreaker

Ever since my husband and I went to see “The Vagina Monologues” on Valentine’s Day in 2001, I swore I would never EVER shave Down There. I barely shave my legs past the knee and only recently have I started shaving my armpits in any season other than summer. But approaching my 35th birthday, I feel it is time to find a rite of passage for my entry into this new stage of womanhood. One of my best friends flew to Africa for her 35th, another to Paris. Me? I book a Brazilian.

To be honest, I don’t know precisely what a Brazilian Heartbreaker is when I call Bombshell Brazilian Waxing and Skincare Studio to schedule my appointment, but when the owner, Melissa Bryant, advises me to take four ibuprofen before I come in, I start to get a clearer picture. Surely those children on the way to wild bush or jungle initiation ceremonies were advised no less! If they can do it, so can I.

“I’m not interested in money, I just want to be wonderful,” proclaims Marilyn Monroe from the wall of the adorable, spotless salon where everything is either pink, black or leopard print. Melissa greets me warmly, nodding with empathy as I explain how terrified- and excited- I am. The former general manager of Nesbit’s Salon, Melissa opened Bombshell in February 2010, offering a full range of services in tanning, hair, nail, makeup and all manner of waxing. She has spent many, many years making women wonderful.

As I make myself comfortable on her table, inspecting various bottles of ointment, tweezers and a huge vat of hot green wax, Melissa turns down Frank Sinatra on the phonograph and explains the process. “First,” she says, “You’re going to do The Frog.” There are, I discover, several other yoga positions I will find myself in over the course of the next hour, including the Pretzel and a modified Happy Baby. Totally exposed from the waist down, I bend my legs into V’s as Melissa slathers me with a healthy dose of lotion and lidocaine numbing spray. “I call this greasing the pan,” she laughs, before trimming me with an electric razor. I imagine that I am about to mow the lawn with a sickle on the hottest day of the year, and a tiny bead of sweat forms on my brow.

But the wax is hot in a pleasant way and although I brace every muscle in my body for the first pull, the pain is surprisingly mild. I thank my lucky stars, because in order to complete the job, Melissa must revisit my most delicate nether regions with this wax and yank process a few dozen more times. Her upbeat, professional bedside manner could school more than a few gynecologists, I think, shocked to find myself yammering away as if I were wearing pants, in a coffee shop somewhere.

“I am so OCD,” says Melissa, fastidiously cleaning me up with a razor and tweezers, fashioning a perfect heart out of heretofore raw materials, coating the final product in baby powder and tea tree oil. “This is Bactine for your hoo-ha,” she explains, admiring her handiwork. And I must say, for a girl like me, the results are both pretty and pretty shocking. “I kicked ass!” I tell Melissa and she agrees. After this, I could do most anything.

She sends me out the door with a congratulations and a care package: detailed maintenance instructions, an exfoliating glove and a blow pop. As I walk to the car I feel triumphant with my secret. There’s a fine line between a skinned cat and a fresh peach, but who’s splitting hairs?

Bombshell Brazilian Waxing and Skincare Studio is located at 10 S. Crenshaw Avenue in Carytown. For appointments, visit www.ilovebombshell.com or call 342-0051.

Published in Belle, August 2010

The Holiday Sweater

Everybody in my extended family has a different religion and a different last name. In many ways our motley crew exemplifies the American melting pot, but in other ways we are as unique as the raw baby cocoanut pies with dehydrated seed crusts my mother makes as a holiday treat. We are rife with divorce, remarriage, step-siblings (who have their own step-siblings), in-laws, half-relations and hyphenated last names.

I was raised every other week between a New Age Jewish mother and a once-upon-a-time Methodist father who were both creative in their religious approach. For every Christmas tree of my youth, there was an equal or better Hanukkah bush. I received gifts on both the eight little nights and the one big day. Mid-December meant fried latkes and gold covered gilt, but also Yule logs, eggnog and fruit cake. As a child, the mish-mashed holidays were separated by whatever distance my parents were living apart at the time. I told my friends that I was “half Jewish,” a segment of the population once rare but now growing by leaps and bounds. Because lately the Chosen Few have chosen to marry around.

I, myself, married a Southern Baptist. Our thrift store menorah is displayed right next to our Dollar Store Nativity Scene. One of our ornaments says “Baby’s First Hanukkah.” We string lights across our roof, but I try to limit the color selection to blue and white. Someday, my blonde, blue-eyed son will just as confused as me, but for now he doesn’t distinguish his gifts from the cardboard box they came in.

Still, no matter how schizophrenic our house looks around the holidays, there is nothing like receiving a Christmas sweater from my mother-in-law to set off the identity crisis I’ve only barely managed to keep at bay. Yes, I quoted the Book of Ruth “For wherever you go, I shall go” passage in a pre-wedding letter to her, but I was referencing the Old Testament. I so badly wanted to be the perfect daughter-in-law that untying the white satin bow atop the red and green plaid paper to discover a delicate black knit sweater tastefully embroidered with a deep red flower caused me actual agony.

My own mother’s gifts have always been wrapped in the story of how cheaply she managed to find them. “What a bargain, this one!.... the best little yard sale… oy, my barter club!” But unlike the teddy-bear-spinning-a-dreidel socks from my mother that scream “ironic-kitsch!” my mother in law’s gift was simply too elegant, too understated, too real for me to consider wearing. I worried. Could wearing a sweater endorsing one religion cancel out the other? Does a proclamation of Christmas across my chest make me less Jewish? And, most importantly, can I don a poinsettia and still consider myself “cool?” To leave the house in my mother-in-laws gift felt like a more serious commitment than actually marrying her son. I thanked her profusely and then took the sweater home to hold hostage in my closet.

Finally, in a holiday tradition I can live with, re-gifting, I found the poinsettia sweater a happy home. I did not reconcile all of my feelings about how best to blend blood with the holidays, but I did answer one question. Am I the kind of person that can pull off a holiday sweater? No, I am not. But I am the kind of person that will warmly embrace you while you wear yours, whatever religion- or lack thereof- is embroidered across the front.


Belle Magazine, Dec-Jan 2011
Image borrowed from MyUglyChristmasSweater.com

Almost Alternative: Navigating the murky terrain between the bohemian and the bourgeois

Being self-employed has a long list of pros and cons, so to tip the scales in the favor of eating regularly, last spring, I acquired myself a mentor. A spit-fire writer in her early seventies, she dishes out equal parts encouragement and criticism, never mincing words although she says she’s like a priest—confessions exit her head as quickly as they enter it.

Recently she called to tell me that she’d finished reading my manuscript.

“You’re a real talent, Valley,” she said, “but the question is, what are you going to do with it? You need discipline! Reading your writing is like racing through a museum with too many paintings on the walls. You need to slow down.” Essentially she was saying that I had something readable that needed to be entirely rewritten. I felt my spirit soar and then flop as it always done when my as yet unrealized potential is held up for inspection.

But instead of balking, I listened. You can’t just pick up a mentor on special at Martin’s. They are hard won. In fact, I feel I deserve special recognition just for having one. A reference to our working relationship really beefs up my self-esteem and my resume, a few short lines after “Waffle House Waitress” and “Food Lion Coupon Distributor.” She went on to quote Gustave Flaubert, who said, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“Get boring, girl!” she said.

I agreed that I would try, but getting more boring than I already am is a task. All of the bohemian types I once knew, like me, now have dental insurance and mortgages. Well, that’s not entirely true. One friend is living in a corner of an abandoned warehouse, another sends me emails about her skinny dipping expeditions in Sierra Leone. But by and large the ramblin’ fever with which I used to burn has been watered down.

While there are many ways that I do live on the edge (I actually don’t have dental insurance), I am, for all intents and tax purposes a wife and a mother living in the suburbs. This is a set of facts I often find difficult to accept, much like Steve Martin who refused to believe he was anything other than a small black boy in “The Jerk.” My once bleached, dreaded hair now gets conditioned and blow-dryed. Sensible crocs have replaced the combat boots and fishnet stockings of yore. I can almost say that I am now more comfortable blending in than sticking out.

To enhance the boringness of my life I could stop going to all night dance parties- but oh, wait, I already did that- twelve years ago when I also stopped hopping from state to state, man to man, etc. But what I could really do, that would have an actual impact on the quality of my artistic life, is not say yes when I mean no. I could silence the phone and disconnect the internet when I’ve carved out time to write. I could make a schedule, adhering to it when it’s the last thing on God’s green earth I want to do. I could slough off the outdated belief that being creative means being haphazard and wild. Because being boring and being disciplined are two entirely different beasts; beasts that must be slain politely and with decorum, in the manner of the bourgeois.

From Belle, November 2010.

The Circuitous Route

I seem to be a fan of the circuitous route, even when I try my hardest to adhere to the straight and narrow. Last week for example, I drove back from Petersburg to Richmond via 95 South, 295 North and Route 895--- a highway I didn't previously know existed but whose $2.75 toll plaza moved the term "highway robbery" to the forefront of my vocabulary. Getting home from the county dump continues to mystify me, even though I am perfectly capable of driving directly there when the piles in the backyard are adequate. My father once invented the term "spatial relations dyslexia" especially for me, but I am now trying to use this handicap of perspective to my advantage. Going at things sideways can be far more effective and far more interesting, especially when applied to packing, or art.

I forget the least stuff when I leave my suitcase (or canvas sack, really) in the corner of the bedroom for a 24-48 period of time and then throw something in it every time I walk past. Likewise, leaving word documents up on the screen and throwing words or phrases at them offhandedly doesn't give me that dreaded or (equally bad) overly ambitious feeling of Sitting Down to Write. And too, the books and movies that have left the strongest impression on my psyche never make it from Point A to Point B without scooping up and inspecting C-Z first.

"Out of Sheer Rage," Geoff Dyer's book about D.H. Lawrence is composed almost entirely of asides, completely brilliant in their neuroses. Ross McElwee's documentary "Sherman's March" is everything Sherman, but more importantly, everything but.

I admire linear thinkers, but if I am on the path to becoming one, it is via the most indirect route possible.

Who cares what I have to say?

I haven’t quite answered this question yet, but when memoirist, Phyllis Theroux, hired me to archive 30 years worth of her personal essays, I considered it differently. The beauty and humor with which she writes about cockroaches, having a conversation with an elderly prostitute, not wanting to take out the trash, watching a snake eat a frog, raising three kids on her own and the life of a writer exemplifies the very idea of finding the universal within the personal. Alongside the columns indicating which articles had yet been scanned and filed, I was tempted to create a column for which articles made me laugh, cry or get goose bumps, most of which did all three. Phyllis has an impressive resume- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Jim Lehrer Newshour, several amazing books, etc. - but even more impressive is her ability to hook the details of her life into the tapestry of the bigger picture.

Phyllis is a disciplined and prolific writer-- two adjectives anyone living a creative life aspires for-- but what I admire about her writing most is its deeper exploration and hence, elevation of common occurrences. Domestic life is not insignificant. Time spent on a train talking to a stranger does not simply vanish. Phyllis holds a magnifying glass to her eye, turning that ragged shard of glass into a prism. Rather than offering you a glass of water she leads you down the rocky, exquisite path to the ocean where she got it from. Luckily for the rest of us, Phyllis Theroux lives- and writes- an examined life. Luckily for my scanner, but sadly for my eager, endless appetite for her work, the files are complete.

Visit Phyllis Theroux's website, here.