I am hear to spread the word, to dissolve a great lie, to shed some light.

In other words, I'm here to bitch and complain.

You know in the movies when they show women going to the spa, the beauty parlor, the gossip place? The women all have goo all over their faces with cucumbers on their eyes. One spa lady works on a manicure and another works on a pedicure as the women lean back like queens and relax. When they leave, they're polished, coifed (I actually don't know what "coifed" means, but I'm sure that's what they look like) and feeling beautiful, off to either get married or close that important deal.

Yeah, it's all bullshit.

I recently turned 30. I wanted to give myself a nice gift. Instead, what I got was grist for this article. I spent $70 on a facial, manicure and pedicure. I paid these women to treat me like a princess, to take one more stab at keeping my youthful appearance (because you know it all goes to hell the morning you wake up on your 30th birthday.) I wanted to be pampered and relaxed.

None of that happened.

What happened was this: I arrived there and was led to a dark little room where I was told to make myself comfortable on a table. The woman put on a nice little steam thingy that humidified the room and a plinky plink CD to relax me. All sounds like the right recipe, right?

So then she started inspecting my face. "How often do you wash your face?" she asked me, sounding disapproving.

"Once," I said, then feeling like a dirty dirty girl, added, "I don't wear makeup so I don't see much reason in washing at night."

"Mmm. That's not good enough, you need to wash twice a day. What do you wash with?"

I told her, proud of the fact that I actually use a special face wash and moisturizer instead of a bar of soap – this is a recent change. It still wasn't good enough. I needed to do use a face wash, a toner, a moisturizer, and a 3X a week mask. Jesus, if I did that I'd be spending all my time washing my face. I might eventually just scrub all of the skin off and not have to worry about it anymore.

Starting to get irritated, I clammed up, tried to relax to the plinky plink music. It was then that I noticed it was one song played over and over again. It ceased to relax me.

She smeared some goo on my face and said "this may tingle." It reminded me of my childhood dentist who, before he gave me a shot of Novocain, said I'd feel "A little tickle." I felt as if my face was being eaten away by acid. She washed that off and put something on "that may burn a little."

I left my facial feeling clean, refreshed, and like a dirty, lazy, cheap woman who doesn't do near enough for my face and is going to die early of clogged pores. I had to go out to the lobby and wait for my manicurist to be ready for me. The facial lady followed me and started to try to sell me the products she'd used on my face.

Oh, darn, she didn't have one of the flay-the-skin-from-my-face wash, but she did have the mask. She held it in front of me and told me at length of its glories, and how it was a big tub and I could use it for 8 months at least. I took if from her and looked at the price.

$47.

Seriously. More than the facial itself. I told her no.

I then headed for my pedicure and manicure.

This spa used to have several women working for them, one was a wonderful, chipper woman named Ivy. She listened to what I wanted and didn't seem to find anything I did unusual. Ivy has since left the spa, in what I can only assume is bad grace and some sort of spa in-fighting. Maybe she attacked someone with a nail file. Or someone threw hot wax on her. My imagination runs wild when I think of violent cosmetologists and their disputes.

This woman, however, after a rough pedicure where I had to tell her more than once to be more gentle, apparently hated me.

You see, what I like done to my fingernails when I'm feeling saucy is what I call a Drusilla manicure. Drusilla, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had colored nails (sometimes black, sometimes red) with white tips. This is much like a French manicure, only the French don't use a color, just clear polish and white tips. Even if you're not knowledgeable of fingernails and their grooming, you can figure this out, right?

Nope. I had to explain it to this woman several times. She said she couldn't do it. I am not the snarky kind of person to say "Well, Daddy lets me do it, so you should too, mom!" Or, in this case, as Ivy isn't my daddy, "Well Ivy did it for me..." But she asked. She actually asked who had done it for me before.

After I told her, I was ready to withdraw my fingers from her angry grasp for fear she would file them down to bloody stumps. I'd said the word. I'd said Ivy. She said fine, if Ivy could do them, then so could she, but she'd have to charge me more.

Well, she'd thrown down the gauntlet, I wasn't about to back down now.

"Ivy charged me the same."

The rest of the manicure was done in relative silence, with her knocking stray fingers out of the way as she painted. Halfway through, she looked at my nails, made a face, and asked, "You like that?" as if I were eating fish genital ice cream.¹

I finally escaped with, admittedly, a lovely set of purple and white nails. It was the end of the day and the reception area was crowded with the various chatty cosmetologists. I supposed they are designed to look as if they go to the spa every day, else we point our perfect nails at them and scream "Physician heal thyself!" They were frightening with their curly hair and their perfect skin. I had new toes and new fingers and a shiny clean face, but I was still my in my t-shirt, jeans (Oh, the nail lady admonished me for wearing jeans to a pedicure) with my painfully straight hair.

As I got my credit card carefully from my wallet, they all started to make a fuss over my nails.

"Wow, I've never seen anything like that!"

"Did you just have that done?"

"Well I bet she just had a ball doing that!"

I can't decide whether it's a virtue of mine or a flaw that I smiled an nodded instead of saying, "Well, now that you mention it, she was a right tool about it."

Then they asked me how I'd thought of that style. Forgetting that not everyone I have contact with is a geek, I told them. Bad idea.

Every single face got coated with a polite mask, and one woman, the tall one with too much makeup and frighteningly curly blond hair said, "Oh, I think I've heard of that."

Fuck it. They asked. So I told them all about Drusilla, the mad vampire with the lovely goth/Victorian fashion sense and her fabulous nails. I held back from gushing about the delicious Spike and how he got his soul back. But it felt like I was getting a little of my own back, dragging them kicking and screaming into my world as I ran screaming from theirs. They looked very uncomfortable, their faces held resolute in the "eventually she's going to have to shut up and leave because we have to close the store and go home to watch "Who Wants To Marry My Dad?" kinda way.

And so, as I left, I amended my personal description to be "dirty, lazy, cheap weirdo freak who doesn't do near enough for my face and is going to die early of clogged pores." On the way home I fantasized about what Drusilla would have done in my place. Not that I would have liked to kill them all and feed on their corpses, but it would have been nice to get a little respect.

1. They made this on Iron Chef. No joke. The fortune-teller told the Iron Chef that he should be ashamed of himself.