Ola!

Perhaps it’s time I surrendered quietly to lovely middle-age and bought myself a nice, comfy pair of slacks that come up to my armpits, elasticised in the waist, raising my head from a crossword puzzle for just long enough to murmur “That’s nice dear” at whatever passes me by. I am exhausted from pondering ‘Beauty Therapy’ to whit, The Brazilian.

Nice girls don’t do Brazilians. Nice girls guffaw about needing a whipper snipper before charging into the surf and emerging to find all that was tucked in has become un-tucked and is causing people on the beach to blanch and flee.

I’m thinking the Brazilian is just another unavoidable blip on the popular culture landscape, like Pilates classes and shoulder pads, except there’ll be no photographic evidence for the future, which on one hand is a complete bummer because it would be fun to squeal “Oooooo! You had a Brazilian! What a loser!” but on the other hand, photographic evidence would seriously offend my sensitive and priggish nature. Nice girls don’t do Brazilians and they don’t have friends who have Brazilians and then photograph them like they were the family pet.

I’ve been asking around and a survey of my inner-circle revealed the following:
My sister-in-law said a friend of hers got one for her husband’s fortieth. I’m still trying to work out who actually got it and how they wrapped it.

My neighbour reckons that men who like that sort of thing are sick and perverted.

A mother of two small girls who attend swimming lessons has noted from enforced observation in the change rooms of the public pool, that this, well, hairstyle, knows no particular age barrier and that on more than one occasion she has had to discourage her daughters from staring.

Another friend said she accidentally got one in Singapore and that she thought it really ought to have been administered by a health worker. There followed a discussion about how my Mother had plucked her eyebrows so severely in the 1970s that they’d failed to grow back and now she has to draw them on. Without saying anything further, be warned.

It may not be quantitative research but I feel it’s qualitative.

You know things have become part of the universal psyche when your aging parents are onto it. My Dad brought it up the other day which ordinarily would have caused me to implode with horror and run screaming from the room. I can’t remember what context enabled him to introduce it to the conversation, a repressed memory which no doubt will give me nightmares down the track. The reason I have survived to tell the tale is that he got the name wrong. He called it a Mexican. As the meaning of what he was talking about dawned on me, I managed to blurt out “What does it do? Stand up and wave?” Then I fainted.