This never would have happened if I watched Oprah

Okay, this is really embarrassing, coming as it does so quickly on the heels of my reality TV confessions last week because NOT ONLY is it a story of my embarking upon a rash and poorly conceived adventure, there also never would have been a tale to tell if I hadn’t watched a particular episode of the Tyra show.

I can’t decide which is worse… If I were to say, “I saw a poster in a window of a salon and impulsively opted for a new beauty treatment I’d never even heard of before” or “As I was heading into the salon I saw a poster for a new beauty treatment I’d seen on the Tyra show and decided to try it myself.”

Both bad, right?

So I might as well go with the truth then.

Tuesday I was heading into my regular salon (in the Castro – I like getting my nails done while Amy Winehouse blares and gay men chatter around me) which is run by a tiny Vietnamese man whose entire extended family works there. I had, until yesterday, assumed he was a gay Vietnamese man due to the location of the salon, his attire and the fact he always calls me “honey”. But there was a little girl in there whose mommy was doing my toes and she kept running after him yelling “daddy” so maybe he just understands marketing really well. Oh LORD I am already off topic.

Anyway, as I was entering the salon I saw a new poster that said NOW OFFERING EYELASH PERMS which, sadly, instead of just being something that made me go, “what the hell is that?” Made me go, “Oooh” because, well, I sometimes watch the Tyra show. I’m a trophy wife, but since I’m not a very good one, instead of watching Oprah I watch Tyra. I like Tyra, she mixes her hard-hitting exposés (she won an Emmy for like Best Informational Talk Show or something to that effect) on things like transvestites, overweight people who have porn websites, anorexics, growing up gay in the hood, etc., with Fashion and Beauty shows. Yes, I know this from experience. Shut up.

Also, and I’m sure this, more than talk of buying a gun, is likely to generate hate mail but I really don’t like Oprah. I’m sorry. She scares me. She has always scared me. Her fake eyelashes scare me. I’ve never been particularly good with mother figures and she is like the ULTIMATE mother figure. It seems like her shows are mostly about telling you what you’re doing wrong with your diet or your love life with some doctor (remember: Dr Phil is TOTALLY her fault) telling you why your poo is the wrong color. And the rest of the time she has guests on like Barbara Striesand which: no thanks. Her omnipresence (it that even a word) kinda freaks me out too. And does she have to BE on the cover of her own magazine every single freaking month? I mean, her NAME is already on there, do we NEED a photo as well? And can I blame Oprah for Rachel Ray too? Because although I only had a few minutes of her perkiness inflicted on me by my parents (who had her on when I walked in the house and it took me a little while to unearth the remote and hit the OFF button) Every time I see her GRINNING face on the cover of her magazine I want to hit her. The holiday issue last year where she was wearing the fur hat? Literally made me want to commit random acts of violence every time I saw it. Oh look, I’m off topic again… Okay, enough stalling.

So anyway, one of Tyra’s shows was about women with beauty complaints and how, on the show, she was going to solve them. And one of them was some woman complaining that she has “flat” lashes. And I felt her a little. I know that having dark lashes is at least somewhat of a blessing but MINE just sit there and attempts to curl and mascara them always result, without exception, with me, cranky and raccoon-eyed, tossing yet another tube of mascara into the trash.

So Tyra announced they were going to give this girl the newest thing in salon treatments – an EYELASH PERM! And of course HERS looked amazing. The process looked simple and the end result really did make her eyes look so much better.

So cut back toTuesday. So I walked into the salon to request a brow wax and mani-pedi (my usual) and as the woman was waxing my brows I tried to casually ask her some questions about eyelash perming. Unfortunately, there was something lost in translation and she RAN out of the room and came back with the owner and he started excitedly explaining to me how it would work and that he would give me a discount because I am such a good customer and as soon as my brows were done they would start. I now realize what he was saying over me in Vietnamese was “this is so great, I’ve been wanting to try one of these ever since the supplies came in last week!”

So there was much digging around for supplies under the table I was laying on and I realized that the owner himself would be performing the procedure.  He cleaned my eyes and then said “Okay, honey, now I put the glue on your eyes okay? Hold still.” And I was thinking, “glue? I thought they just had these pads with adhesive on both sides.  I’m pretty sure that’s what they used on the Tyra show” and he started painting CRAZY GLUE or something on my eyelids. Then he glued down a pad, then MORE glue was applied and then he used a little stick to force my eyelashes back and onto the glue covered pad (and, of course, to repeatedly poke me in the eye). This went on for a while, glue, stick, gouge, me trying to somehow pull my eyeballs further back into my head so they wouldn’t get glued shut. And the whole time they were talking over me which I am sure was like “should the lashes be all clumped up like that?” and “It will be fine”, and then he put perm solution on them which, aside from the smell causing flashbacks to the 80s, was also just weird. And then they left me laying there in the dark for 15 minutes to “process”.  This gave me a chance, after getting tired of saying “I am so retarded I am so retarded I am so retarded“ about 50 times, to put my expectations in order from most to least likely.

1. I would be blind
2. I would be partially blind
3. My eyelids would end up glued shut
4. My eyelashes would all fall out
5. My eyelashes would look all jacked up for the next month until it wore off
6. It would actually look really nice

So I laid there wondering how I was going to explain to John that I had blinded myself with STUPIDITY (not that he’d be surprised or anything) while I “processesd”.

Eventually he came back, rinsed the lashes, sort of, put the, oh, whatever you call that other part of the perm that tells your hair that yes, you meant it, and left for the length of a nicely remixed Stevie Nicks song whose title still escapes me. It wasn’t “Gypsy”.

So then he returned and there was lots more rubbing, careful removal of the pads and finally he washed my eyes out with saline solution. When he was done I was relieved that apparently my vision had survived. So they pulled out a mirror and aside from the fact that I was totally without makeup due to all the rinsing that had gone on, it looked pretty good. So I asked if I could use the bathroom, partly because I really needed to GO and partly because I wanted a better look at my eyes. So I got up close to the mirror in the bathroom and they really did look pretty good. So I sent up a prayer that I had escaped punishment for my impulsive act and went back out to get my mani-pedi. The only problem at that point was that every time I would fully open my eyes I would FEEL my lashes hit the back of my eyelids. It was really distracting.

An hour later, pulling into the Safeway parking lot to get groceries I decided to take another look at my lashes so I pulled down the visor mirror and made a sound like, “yearrghulufuck” because: the shit was all fucked up. The left eye had divided into clumps and the right eye was… well, it looked like a BAD perm, curled, going different directions AND clumpy. SO not attractive.  So I took a deep breath and made my way into the store, sunglasses ON, and did a totally ineffective and distracted job of shopping and then drove home where I threw things into the fridge and ran into my bathroom.

I spent the next hour doing the following things:

• Trying to brush them out
• Washing my face
• Trying to brush them out again
• Trying to separate my lashes with my fingers
• Trying to reshape them with an eyelash curler
• Putting on mascara
• Removing mascara
• Washing my face again

After poking around all my lashes I realized that while most of them now felt hard and crunchy the ones on the edges still felt like, well, lashes. I came to the conclusion that somehow the glue he had LIBERALLY applied to my lashes was still on them. So then I painted them with my Cover Girl makeup remover (the only thing on the planet that will remove their glue lipstick) and let that sit for a while and then washed my face again. At that point I realized if I didn’t stop messing around with them it was going to MY fault when they all fell out so I gave up and called John to tell him I was retarded.  I was verbally reprimanded for both the lash perm and the Tyra viewing.

Me: “Can you still love me knowing that I am this lame?"
John: “I’ve loved you for 14 years, why would I stop now?”
Me: “You didn’t KNOW I was lame when we started dating!”
John: “No, I thought you were cool but really you were lame.”
Me: “whimper”
John: “I love my lame babe!”

So I decided to be grateful that it was a subtle lame thing that at worst looked like I really didn’t know how to apply mascara and just wait the 3 – 4 weeks for it to wear off. And of course to keep hoping that my lashes didn’t fall out later in some kind of delayed reaction.

John got home, announced that he really couldn’t see much difference and that he still loved me even though I was lame.

So we had dinner, and WINE, which I really needed by that point. When I went back into my bathroom to get ready for bed I noticed that my eyelids were red and swollen all along where the glue had been. I realized I had totally left “My eyes will swell shut due to a chemical reaction” off my list. So I rubbed A&D ointment all over the area (very attractive), hoped to GOD I would be able to open my eyes in the morning and went to bed.

The next morning they looked clumpy but not any worse and the swelling, thankfully, had almost completely gone down. In the shower that morning I spent quite a bit of time letting the warm water run over my face and extra time washing it and seemed a little less stiff. So I was still hopeful that, while they will probably remain crooked as long as the “perm” lasts that the stiffness will diminish as the glue slowly is cleaned out of my lashes. They still looked like a clumpy jacked-up mess however. This is one of the very few times in my life I’ve been glad I wear glasses.

It is now Friday and my eyelashes still pretty much look like I ineptly curled my lashes and then clumped mascara on them. On the bright side, they haven’t fallen out yet. I was going to go to the Salon today and just sort of give them a heads up that maybe they should take the poster DOWN until they get a little better at it but I can’t think of the right way to phrase it so I’m going to use the excuse that I have John’s car today (which is much harder to park in the city) to NOT go in there. Maybe I’ll go Monday if they still look this bad then.

THE MOST SHAMEFUL PART:

That night John said, “So, do you promise NEVER to do this again?” in a voice that totally assumed the answer would be a repentant yes and I kind of just looked at him and he was like “Seriously?” and I said,“I can promise never to go have THOSE people do it again but if it becomes really popular and there’s a salon where there’s someone who is an expert at it and I have a special occasion coming up… I might try it again.”

He just shook his head and sighed.