California Dreaming: Bare Naked Ladies
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
So here is what you do: get a job interview in Vegas, and while you’re there, put $10 on 33. You will win $350! Then, lose a hundred of that trying to do it again, because of how you’re greedy. But you still have $250, hooray!
When you get back from Vegas, have yourself just a terrible week. It doesn’t matter how—maybe you had two job interviews in a week, at last and hallelujah (!), but then landed neither. Maybe your boyfriend is being pooey. It doesn’t matter what—your living room isn’t Darfur, or Haiti, and we all know you don’t like to complain. But still, you have just a little Sad, and so you start falling apart. You have canker sores, an infected thumb, bacteria flamencoing through your urinary tract, even a stupid strained wrist, and your backne, always present, is flaring red enough to guide a 747 home.
Do you know what you need? You need to go be naked with other women. Why? Because when I was in just such a situation as you, that’s what I did, and I always do things the best! Oh, at first I was going to save my $250, because I am no fun. But then, when all my various bacteria started their parties, I realized I need a stresservention. I looked at some fancy lady places on the Internets, and almost booked them then and there, until a high-starred entry on Yelp made me rethink the fluffy robes and minted ice water and 80-minute facials amid dimly glowing lights and tinkling white noise. Because here is what Yelp said: “I celebrated my birthday by running around in my birthday suit—at Wilshire Spa!” Thank you, Tara C. of Los Angeles, California. I am intrigued, and will read more!
A small bit of research led me past Wilshire Spa and to Hankook Sauna, where it cost $20 less and boasted an extra half star. I picked up my purse and walked out the door, and 15 minutes later, I was naked in a damp, dank, wonderful room with hot tubs and saunas and old dumpy Korean ladies and one lady in her 40s or 50s who looked Jewish and was gigantic. She sat hunched over in the sauna, her breasts flopped to her knees, and when she got up to leave, I stared from the corner of my eye. I would have been disgusted by her obesity were she clothed—I am disgusted by tremendously fat people—but nude she was magnificent. Her flesh billowed in discrete pouches, like the Michelin man or a cumulus cloud. She could have been a marvelous statue. But it was hard for her to walk.
The old dumpy Korean ladies were marvelous to look at naked too; their pubic hair reminded me of adorable lisping public television art educator Sister Wendy talking about “lovely fluffy pubic hair,” and their bottoms were so flat they actually curled into their legs like a the tail of a dog who’s been bad. For $15, you can enter the saunas and hot tubs and rooms with floors of Himalayan rock salt that you lie upon, so most of the old women did not pay for a scrub and massage. Instead, they sat on benches and scrubbed each other. Friendship!
I, on the other hand, clearly needed something done to my lymphatic drainage, and stat, so I paid my $70 and was scrubbed down, Silkwood-style, for a solid 40 minutes. There was no shyness in the slightest, even when Song lifted my legs like she was trussing a chicken and went at my inner thighs, giblets hangin’.
It was and wasn’t relaxing; it wasn’t mood music and warm tea, especially when Song went at me with her elbows; anything that wasn’t bone was quickly and fearsomely dislodged while I crowed like a rooster and once bent back completely, like an archery bow. They say marijuana puts you in the now; not nearly so much as a fierce, kind immigrant thwacking you with hot towels and slapping you for no reason you can see. You don’t think about anything beyond the sounds of what Song is doing to you and the scent of the cucumber she just pulverized and mashed onto your face and the slick of gallons of thin oil being poured over you before more gallons of hot water dumped unceremoniously, and then you wash your face in a bowl of warm milk and take your fifth shower in two hours, and you never go back to a fancy lady spa with its soothe and its tinkle ever again.
Comments
OK—I came to this page because your name and the phrase “Bare Naked Ladies” together was too much for me to resist. I love your “stresservention” !
2010-02-02 by DonStress will take you out, quick. I’ve never been one to stress, it just isn’t in my make up. But lately I’ve been stressing. Maybe if I had a newspaper to read- in American English. Unfortunately not.
So my plan is to just say no!
Assholes want me to act as if, like some sort of reality show, screw that. Thats whats making me stress. But anyway, yeah, its a reality tv show. It was supposed to be about formation and teamwork. Ha!
We shall see. Heres some really good ambient music that I dedicate to you, Rebecca. Its called ‘Goddess of the Moon’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPzppyhlcfA
2010-02-03 by Robert Hagen
i so enjoyed my korean spa visit through your words.
one of these days i’ll get there in the flesh.
2010-02-01 by florence