WHATEVER PEDICURES YOU: My day at the spa.

Occasionally my wife will ask me if I can watch the kids so she can go get a pedicure. I’m not sure if she actually wants a pedicure or she just needs some time away from the kids. It could be a bit of both. There’s no question my wife is obsessed about how her feet look. This is a woman who went to get a pedicure the day before she was scheduled to go into labor.  I’m not scoffing. I get it.

I get it because I know my wife, and thus women by default. When you’re a woman, you’re only as beautiful as the least observed part of your body. Least observed for me anyway. If I’m looking at my wife’s feet it’s because I’ve done something wrong.  

So, when it comes to my own feet, my belief has always been: I have nail clippers and I know how to use them. Enough said.   

Recently though, my wife invited me to join her at King’s Spa in the North Chicago Suburbs. Normally I avoid spas, or what I call the three M’s: Massage, Mud, and Meditation. They do nothing for me. However, this time I decided to join her. “This place is different, I think you’ll like it,” she said.

It didn’t hurt that I’d been reading some self-improvement book talking about stepping out of your comfort zone.  However, thanks to an impulse purchase, I was about to be launched out of my comfort zone, there was no step.  And that impulse purchase was a FULL BODY SCRUB.  It sounded innocent. I had no idea what I was in for.

After leaving the front desk I entered the men’s area and was told to take a shower and then soak in the hot tub where I would wait for my name to be called. It was the most time I ever spent hanging out with naked men. I was cool. Eventually a Korean man with a towel around his waist called, “Derick?”  “Present!” It would be the last verbal communication I had with him.  He then motioned me to lie face down on a table in the corner and the scrub began. It was…thorough. He washed parts of my body I didn’t even know I had.  At one point I had to fight the urge to cry as I told him about the time I lost my dog. And then the scrub began. You didn’t have to explain the concept of elbow grease to this man. At one point I almost blurted out, “That’s a birthmark!” When it was done, it was safe to say, all the cards were on the table.

I got up from the table, put on the cotton shirt and shorts provided by the spa, and found my wife in the lounge area. 

“What happened to you?” She could see something was different. 

Knowing the importance of cleanliness to my wife and how a lack of it can kill her libido, I smiled and I said, “I want you to know that I’m the cleanest I’ve been in the fifteen years that we’ve known each other.”  I then seductively bit my bottom lip.

Always the expert at finding a person’s weak spots, my wife stared down at my feet. Her nose crinkled. “You gotta do something about those feet!”

I sighed and returned to the front desk. “One pedicure, please.” 

Hey, when you’ve come this far, what’s another couple of inches…