Facial Anyone?

I’ve never been big into beauty products. I find those women, you know the kind, the Heathers and the Stephanies and the Staceys who work behind cosmetic counters, positively intimidating!

If I see some woman (or a gay guy) standing in a Department store hanging on to perfume and giving out samples, I pretty much duck and cover and walk at least two aisles out of my way just to avoid them as if I’m detouring a potential landmine site.

I’m not really sure how this phobia began! I realize it sounds like it may be wrapped up in self-esteem issues but it’s not really that. Not anymore. Maybe now it’s just a deeply ingrained habit. I think what it really is, is that way down at my core, I’m actually really, really shy. It’s the same reason I don’t like to talk on my cell phone in confined public spaces. There are SOME THINGS that should just stay PRIVATE! Like flossing!

I’ve never had a manicure. Never had some tiny person of colour kneeling at my feet sloughing off the dead skin of my heels because, oh, I don’t know, to me it reeks of colonialism or something. I realize they’re being paid. Apparently, by the looks of it, I’m one of the few people on the planet, or at least on Robson Street, who feel this way. But, I just can’t do it. It’s the same reason I can’t call up a male escort and believe me it’s not because I haven’t really wanted to.

I don’t want a tattoo. I don’t want jewels or flowers painted on my nonexistent nails. Aren’t I a child of God already? Aren’t I just perfect the way I am? Give or take the extra 25 pounds. I’ve never even had anything waxed.

To think that there are women out there having what they call “Brazilians” just amazes me. What do you call those people who offer that service for a living besides suckers? I’d love to hear their title. Maybe it’s something that’s a cross between whatever they call a greeter at Wal-Mart and a dog groomer. I mean, can you imagine waxing someone’s butt hair and ripping it out. For who? For some guy? Give me a break. I don’t think so.

As my favourite comedian, Margaret Cho would say,” If someone is fucking me and they’re that uptight about what I look like they shouldn’t be fucking me in the first place.”

How do they do that anyway? Get at those hairs? Like, do you get up on a table and bend over doggy style? It’s one of those things I’ve always wondered. And the whole bikini wax thing. I’m way past wearing a bikini so there’s no need to shave the hair down there into a landing strip. I’m not exactly expecting the world. It’s not Heathrow International. It’s more like one of those landing strips in the outback, the grassy strip that you can hardly see from the sky cuz it hardly ever gets used!

But every once in a while, I do treat myself to a massage and yesterday I thought, I really want a facial too. I go to this place with the required French name. They have the requisite Enya tape playing forever. When Enya runs out, they put on the Buddhist chimes, or the rushing water or the forest sounds. I get undressed and get onto the table face down.

So I’m lying there trying to get into the zone and this woman puts her hands on my back and in my mind I let out this blood-curdling scream because her hands are so damned cold. It’s as if she’s just come in from the corner of Portage and Main in Winnipeg during a white-out. Not wanting to be difficult, instead of saying something, like a normal person would, or actually letting out the scream, I control my mind. I consider this a spiritual exercise. COLD HANDS, WARM HEART. COLD HANDS WARM HEART I repeat over and over again.

For 60 minutes she has her hands running all over my body and instead of being able to relax I can’t seem to control my monkey mind. I can’t shut off these thoughts I’m having so I’m not really relaxing because I’m feeling like I’m picking up on HER thoughts and I feel like she wants to go home. She’s tired. She has a cold. She tells me this when I arrive. Great I think. Perfect. Rub your germs all over me. I want to be sick too. Maybe you have some of that stringy snot still on your fingers to make this really special.

Next, it’s time for the facial. I was REALLY looking forward to this part the most. I meet the woman. She’s European. She doesn’t seem very warm, personality wise. But her skin is flawless.
“What’s your beauty routine?” she asks.
MMM? How do I break it to her I think. “Umm. I don’t know!”
“What do you wash your face with?” she asks.
“Soap,” I say, knowing that even THAT’S a lie. Usually I just use water, which now that I say that out loud is even a bit shocking to me. Who am I? Pig Pen? I’m definitely not the little red headed girl in Charlie Brown cartoons even though I do have red hair. Oh my. In my mind I begin to visualize the re-runs of that makeover show, Style by Jury.

“You know, I don’t mean to alarm you,” she says but your skin is prematurely aged. It’s dehydrated. It’s SO dry. It’s coarse. It doesn’t have the FLEXIBILTY of the skin someone your age. How old does she think I am? I wonder. Maybe she thinks I’m 30 I think, in a classic moment of denial. I thought I was doing okay because most people don’t think I’m as old as I am. But apparently my friends aren’t REALLY my friends after all. Apparently they haven’t even been LOOKING at me. If they had, they would have recommended plastic surgery a long time ago if I’m to believe this chic.

Anyway, I’m wrapped up like a newborn. I can barely move my friggin arms. It’s as if she was trained as an embalmer or something. Or, I’m being prepared for a traditional Hindu burial. Light the pyres!!

She covers my eyes and begins to rub this wonderfully aromatic lotion all over my face, my neck and my shoulders and at that point I actually begin to have sexual fantasies. If only she wasn’t there. She’s rubbing my face in a way that seems like it’s probably some ancient Indian ayervaetic, yogic, tantric procedure that she learned from her guru. I know for sure I’m probably not doing a very good job of concealing the smirk on my face.

Her magic fingers are slathering this stuff all over my face and neck and shoulders and then without saying a word she puts on some steamer, as if I’m a child who has a severe bout of pneumonia and she’s my granny and then I hear the door close. She doesn’t even say goodbye. I have abandonment issues lady! Where the hell are you going? How long am I going to be left here?

I can’t see because my eyes are covered. And then I notice the music. I calm down. I’m trying to get in sync with my breathing because to be honest I’m feeling a little claustrophobic. Five minutes pass. 10 minutes. I start to move my legs around. It feels like an entire afternoon has passed. Did she forget me? I lift up my back. I have to get my arms out of this straight jacket. I begin to sort of thrash around a bit. My blankets surely must look like I’ve been having a bad dream. I’m actually feeling like I might just have to get up and run screaming from the room. What are these blankets made of? Why is it so HOT in here? Am I having a hot flash? I wish they’d turn that damned music off. What the hell are those monks chanting anyway? Please just SHUT UP, I think. How does she stand listening to THAT all day?

I start to actually let out some audible sighs, groans, like maybe uttering sound of my own will help me. I can’t stand it any longer and just as I sit up, my eyes still covered, I hear the door open and I scare the hell out of her because I’m sure I look like a dead person in which rigamortis has just set in which is why I’m now stiffly upright!

“You scared me,” she says a little out of breath from the fright. “I`ve never had anyone sit up like that,” she says. I start laughing, a bit on the hysterical side.

“How much longer do you think this is going to take?” I ask. Who knew that my face was a full day’s work; a massive renovation project? Something that some realtor might consider selling for a profit afterwards! "We’re almost done," she says, and I really begin to hope beyond hope that when she takes off the mask I’ll look like Jane Seymour.

But, before I am excused, there’s more. “I don’t want to come across as pushy,” she says “but are you considering buying any product?” I realize at this point that I’d have to have the lack of conscience of a Sociopath to say No. Instead, much to my disbelief I hear myself saying, “Umm. Well, maybe some exfoliant.” I say this as if I’m trying to guess the right answer on a surprise math test in high school. Maybe some day cream?

“Well, that’s a good start,” she says. “But, if I were you, I’d really recommend that you also get the eye cream. I think to myself, Look lady, if you were me, you’d realize how ridiculous it is to be talking to me about my face as if you’re a scientist who just discovered the human genome.

“I’ll just put it all out for you when you come downstairs,” she says. I get downstairs. At this point, I’m feeling resigned to buying whatever it takes to be presentable in public even though I am over 40 and I’m female so nobody’s looking at me anyway.

I’ll take a truckload of whatever shit you want to sell me if it means I can just finally get out of here RIGHT NOW I think.

I finally escape, but not before I have spent more money than it would have cost me to fly to LA and back. Who am I? Lady Di? I’m NOT EVEN WORKING! I just did a freelance job and apparently they should have just done a direct deposit into the bank account of this salon. Now that’s a RELAXING thought.

“Touch your face,” she says. “Your skin looks amazing!” And, well, I have to admit, it is a lot softer!

Beauty never comes cheaply now does it?

O'Keeffe Country

For the past two summers I have taken a photography course offered at the 21,000 acre Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

The spirit of the place exists in its looming orange landscapes, in the intimacy that develops quickly between strangers, and a solitude that provides the much needed space to listen better to oneself.

If I close my eyes, I can see the turquoise worn rug on the floor of the Ghost House where the course takes place. I can feel the scratch of the simple Teal-coloured cushions on the wooden, arm-chaired couch, and allow my mind to linger on the exact shade of blue of the woodwork around the windows.

In that cool quiet sitting room I have wondered if perhaps it is the spirit of all the others who have spent time there before me – including the most famous Georgia O’Keeffe - that creates the feeling of sacredness. It’s as if all the conversations that have ever taken place within those thick, white, adobe walls, hang dust-like, in the same way petroglyphs indicate the presence of earlier inhabitants in other sacred places.

O’Keeffe, the artist most known to the public for her macro stylized view of flowers, and her detailed replication of the skulls and bones she’d collect on her desert walks, lived for 98 years. She died in Santa Fe in 1986. The man, 30 years her junior who had cared for her in the last 13 years of her life, Juan Hamilton, was with her. What were they to each other, really? He knows. The rest is speculation.

She was originally married to a famous photographer. Alfred Stieglitz ran one of New York's most avant garde galleries, Gallery 291, in the 20’s. I wondered whether she would have become famous had a friend of hers actually obeyed her and not shown her charcoal drawings to Stieglitz? Had he not been 20 years her senior, and able to withstand her self-righteous intensity, would her personality and her art have become as iconic?

When you step outside into the courtyard of Ghost House you are confronted in the distance by Pedernal, O'Keeffe's beloved, sloping, flat-topped indigo Mountain. It’s a constant reminder of her former presence. Her ashes were scattered at its base and she was well-known for having proclaimed, "God told me that if I painted it enough he would give it to me."

She moved to the Abiquiu area, permanently in 1949, three years after Stieglitz died. He’d never seen the ranch preferring to remain in New York or spend time with his large extended family at Lake George in New York state.
She purchased her house Rancho de los Burros sold to her for a steal by Arthur Pack, the millionaire who owned the ranch and started Nature magazine. In 1955, much to her disagreement, he besqueathed the ranch to the Presbyterian Church so that others would be able to enjoy what he and his wife Phoebe had enjoyed for years. Pack also developed the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tuscon.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe which is the only museum in the United States dedicated entirely to a lone female artist. Events are commemorating its anniversary throughout the summer, each one sure to be on the social calendar of the nouveau riche dripping in turquoise as they enter. They’ve undoubtedly snatched the most desirable tickets including ones to a dinner in late August to be held outside O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu home where a live performance of her favourite chamber music will waft through the evening air. The intent is to allow the guests to experience the majesty of a New Mexican sunset in a way that might give them a minor sense of how it might have been possible for O’Keeffe’s artistic concentration to be captivated for decades.

At the ranch, it’s easy to understand through the magnificence of the rocks, the purity of the ever-changing light and the intimacy of a heat that feels supportive not oppressive, how O'Keeffe's attention could have been captivated by this place for decades.

As soon as I arrived, I could feel the warmth sucking the moisture out of my rain-soaked Vancouverite bones. My skin became a human canvas awash with the pastel light shows of the evenings. My mind, so often scattered and not operating in the present, felt clear.

Standing, just after dusk, on a full-mooned night, looking across the alfalfa fields, I could imagine Miss O’Keeffe out and about in her trade-mark black and white. She had on the wide-brimmed black hat. She had on her sensible shoes, scuffed by the dirt of the road from her exploring. She was still surveying the heaven she had found on earth right here at the ranch.

As someone once said, Ghost Ranch is a place where God’s finger pokes through.

I don't know about that but when I'm there, I feel more alive and I feel more acutely aware of my mortality. It’s the kind of place where the natural beauty goes straight to the heart. There's awe and an ache. It's a place where I understand better what the poet Dylan Thomas might have meant when he was moved to write, "... Rage, rage against the dying of the light..."

Hedley

Meeting Destiny in Hedley, BC?

As a child in the 60s, packed away with my brother in the back seat of the blue Pontiac station wagon on our annual summer vacation, I’d squish my face against the window and dream. Past the boulders of the Hope Princeton slide on Hwy 3, the inside of the car grew eerily silent as if the environment outside demanded reverence. As we’d near the village of Hedley, my dad, in the best imitation of our favourite TV show of the time – The Friendly Giant - would alert us to look up, look WAY UP to the buildings on the side of the mountain.

Stretching my meagre neck to see, the dilapidated buildings represented mystery and adventure presumably like the kind I’d seen in cartoons in which skunks would scream, “There’s gold in them there hills!”

Hedley or Sna-za-ist “place of the striped rock” is squeezed into the base of the mountains near the banks of the Similkameen River. In 1898, gold was discovered at Nickel Plate Mountain with a tram built in 1904 to carry the ore from the mine to the mill below. In 1936 the Mascot Mine opened and remained to 1949. About 30 years later the Nickel Plate Mine became an open pit mine and operated between 1985 and 1995. Together the two mines yielded approximately 2.5 million Troy ounces of gold, 600,000 ounces of silver and 1900 metric tonnes of copper. In 1994 assisted by the Hedley Heritage Museum and then local MLA Bill Barlee, the Mascot Mine buildings were saved from demolition and the site restored by the Similkameen Indian Band.
Fast forward 40 years and this summer I felt compelled to visit Hedley as part of a longer road trip.

I was in another transition. I’d just left my job and was taking a break with only one potential employer crossing my consciousness. Located 10 minutes from my house, they develop exhibits for museums and science centers the world over. I’d applied there to no avail previously and as I left on the trip, I made a mental note for my return: Apply again!

I checked into the Gold Rush B&B, a large colonial house with a clean white wrap around veranda. Simon, a Brit from the Cotswolds and his Canadian wife has owned it for 8 years. I walked around the little village. I wandered through the old fashioned country store across the street and looked at the mural of miners on the side of a building. I visited the Hedley Heritage Museum. The Mascot Mine tour was scheduled for the next morning. It was time for dinner. I chose the Hitching Post in the village. Tanya, the waitress, said, “If you’re set on the seafood pasta ask for extra prawns and hold the mussels.” I did. It was scrumptious!

The next morning, Chuck our driver and Mike our guide loaded us into the bus set to wind 40 minutes up the steep switchbacks to the buildings at the top. It was a small group: me, a family of five, and a couple in their early 60s.

“What brings you on this trip?” asked the man of the couple. I relayed my childhood daydreams.
“Are you a geologist?” I enquired. ``No, I own the company that did the exhibits at the top,” he replied. My wife hasn’t seen them. I looked at him, amazement building.
“Is your company on Georgia Street?” I asked, the name escaping me when I needed it most.
“Yes” he said. “It’s called AldrichPears,” handing me a business card that read Phil Aldrich, Principal. I hesitated for a moment. I couldn’t believe it. “I’ve always wanted to work for your company,” I said and I noticed the expression on his face, perhaps amazed that I even knew his company.

We exchanged chit chat. At the top we stepped carefully down the 598 stairs admiring the dot that was Hedley below. At the bottom, we donned hard hats and headed into the mine shaft. . When Chuck ordered “lights out “so we could concentrate on the audio simulation of miners talking while they worked, Trudy Aldrich said, "Gayle, you can hang on to me if you like." It was sweet of her to think of me. I slipped my arm through hers.

We perused the exhibits. We huffed and puffed back up the 598 stairs. "Don’t worry,” said Mike, "I’ve got a defibrillator” and he tapped his backpack. “Haven’t had to use it yet though!” Phil was first to the top. Back in the parking lot he said, "Keep in touch! Send me a resume!”

I returned to my car, smiling, amazed, wondering at the odds of meeting the president of one of the only companies in Vancouver that currently piques my interest as a future employer, and, in Hedley, BC. Population: 250.

If that isn’t fate, what is?