MonkeyPants

I Never Learn.

So today I was on the bus and I saw a sign in a barbershop/beauty salon that said they did threading. And because I am the kind of person who impulsively does stuff, even if I know it’s going to hurt like the dickens, I thought, “Hey, I could get my lip threaded!” Who knows. Next month I may say to myself, “Hey, I could pull my fingernails out!” It’s weird. I know I’m going to regret it, because it’s going to hurt. But I do it anyway. Well, the threading, anyhow. Because I don’t want someone looking at me in sunlight and seeing a ‘tache. I have my small vanities.

Now, there’s the lip thing, and then there’s the eyebrow thing. I hardly ever let anyone do anything to my eyebrows, because they invariably screw with the natural arch, which I quite like, and try to give me straight line eyebrows. Sometimes they give me little tadpolesque shapes. No one needs that.

But I hopped off the bus and I walked into the place. It was lit with fluorescents and not so attractive. In one corner, two young guys were waiting for haircuts from a grim-faced woman in a brown shalwar kameez. In the other corner was a similarly grim-faced woman, also in brown, but with a flyaway perm-bent over a young woman in a chair. She was the threader and she told me to take a seat.

I waited patiently and when the young woman being threaded sat up, she had gorgeous eyebrows. So I thought, why don’t I get my eyebrows done too? The next woman in line took her place and when she got up, SHE had gorgeous eyebrows. So I was sold on the eyebrows thing.

I took my place in the chair and held the skin over and under my eyebrows, the way the grim-faced woman told me. Hey, I thought. This isn’t so bad. It’s twinge-y, and a little sore, but not bad overall. I hope they look ok.

And then she moved to my lip. Oh. Jesus. Pain. Not as bad as I remembered, but hand-clenchingly, eye-crossingly painful. I was crying. “No crying,” intoned the grim-faced woman. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Sorry,” and I wiped my eyes. I apologized for crying to the woman who was ripping the hair off my face.

But then I got up and looked in the mirror, and she hadn’t screwed with the shape of my eyebrows! She noticed that one is slightly different from the other and she worked with it! She gave me perfect eyebrows! I almost kissed her grim face!

So if we must suffer to be beautiful, today, I am ready for the cover of a magazine.