Waxing Update and the North West Shutdown
by Erin Quinn

You can imagine that the post-waxing growth isn’t a pretty situation. I find myself rubbing up against hard edges in public places unconsciously. Sometimes it gets so bad that I have to stick a capped pen into my pants pockets and scratch while attending meetings. I try to do this inconspicuously, but I’m not sure how successful I am.

Since the publication of my article on the waxing mishap, I’ve been the beneficiary of more salon knowledge and some berating as well. My mother said she promises to march into the beauty salon herself and demand my money back if I won’t. My childhood girlfriends, scolded me not for my lack of aggressiveness, that they’ve come to accept—“When I was reading it, [The Waxing] I was so tense because I knew that you would end up giving that woman a tip, and then you did!” said my friend Kristen—so there was no element of surprise there. But they were aghast that I’d actually signed up, once again, for a hair-removal procedure that had been nothing less than tortuous on my pale, Irish skin.

“We’ve been through this before!” said my friend Jen as we passed Sushi around for an all ladies dinner outing to celebrate our friend Samantha’s 36th birthday.

Yes, we’d been through it before. I remember sitting on the sidewalk outside of The Galleria Mall, in Poughkeepsie, NY, which we only refer to as The Gonorrhea. My friends Amy and Kristen had accompanied me for a shopping trip because my then brief-romantic-fling-while-on-vacation-in-Paris had called to say he was coming to visit me in New York. It was summer. While I knew I could dazzle him somewhat with our mountain lakes, I also planned to take my Parisian fling to Cape Cod, thinking it might be the only place within a mild driving distance that could impress someone who had spent the last twenty years vacationing in France, Italy and Spain.

I was at The Gonorrhea to get a bathing suit, sundress, and sandals—only from the bargain racks or sales sections since I and my two friends were poor. Shopping for any length of time exhausts me and brings on either mild anxiety or full blown panic, so all I remember of the trip was sitting outside the Cineplex on a sidewalk near the smoking section and debating with Amy and Kristen the ever delicate question of “to wax or not to wax?”

I had done it once and it left me with a flaming red bikini and upper leg rash, which eventually turned into multiple ingrown hairs and odd-colored blotches.

“He’s French,” Amy offered. “I thought the Frenchy ladies didn’t shave.”

“Yeah, but he’s really Polish,” I reminded her, not sure where that left him in terms of female hair tolerance.

“But he’s lived in France so long and I’m sure he’s used to hairy armpits and legs.”

“I don’t know. The women there looked fairly hairless to me. But it was February.”

We mulled it over on the sidewalk as we smoked and cradled our purchases between our knees. In the end, I made the wrong decision, as I generally tend to do, and got the wax job a day before he was to arrive. The result was ugly, but it seems my French/Polish visitor didn’t mind, because shortly after our sojourn to Cape Cod, after he returned to Paris, I discovered I was pregnant. He greeted the news with joy and shortly after proposed marriage— though a lot of these discussions had whole segments lost in translation. Instead of saying, “Will you marry me?” he might have been saying, “I’d like to marry you but I’m frightened by the rash on your legs. Is it contagious?”

As a non-French speaker, how was I to be sure?

My friend Sam took a whole different tack on my waxing mishap. “I can’t believe you didn’t know what a Brazilian was,” she said, shoving a dumpling into her mouth.

“How was I supposed to know?” I countered. “I don’t visit beauty salons very often.”

“Everyone knows what a Brazilian is,” she said, somewhat disgusted.

“Do you get Brazilians?” I asked, wondering if that could be the reason for her hostility on the subject.

“Jesus, No! Why the hell would anyone do that?”

My friend Amy, offered that she had just learned of something even more disturbing—anal bleaching.

“What?” I said, “What in the hell is anal bleaching?”

“Saw it on Dr. 90210. Women get their anuses bleached white, you know, so that there’s no color.”

This created a lot of stir and shifting of our collective butts on the sushi seat cushions. First of all, I wasn’t even aware of what color a non-bleached anus was. I mean there’s no crayola crayon’s labeled “Anus Brown” or “Rectal Red”—even in the jumbo packs where they have to get really creative with the color names.

That thought was followed by another—what would be the point of anal bleaching? What’s the upside? What’s the goal?

“I don’t know,” professed Amy. “I guess it’s to look pure, girlish…you know, like a pedophile’s dream. It’s gross.”

“Oh yeah, I saw that episode too,” said another friend while we chased our toddlers around the park. Apparently, Dr. 90210 was a popular reality TV show centered on cosmetic surgery. How anal bleaching fell into this category, I wasn’t quite sure.

My friend and fellow park-pal, Karen, quickly brushed off anal bleaching, but said that she was a fan of Brazilians.

“You actually get them?” I said, jumping up and down, partly from nervous excitement of actually knowing someone who had the treatment and partly as a reflex from thinking about the oh-so sensitive areas the waxing treatment targets.

“Well, I don’t get them now!” she said, wiping her three year old daughter’s nose with one hand and cradling her newborn in the other.

“But when I lived in the city, I used to get them all the time.”

“And you didn’t feel awkward having to, you know, let someone in between your but crack with hot wax?”

“Nah. I just spread those cheeks wide open and let them rip. Once it’s done you feel great!”

Well, you learn new things about people every day, I thought.  I’m not one of those thin-skinned types that hold up the hand and deflect detailed anatomical or psychological revelations with a “too much information for me” sign. I always welcome more. In fact, I encourage more. As I left the park that day, I felt oddly proud and somewhat disturbed that I now actually knew someone who not only received Brazilian treatments, but who was a believer.

As we sipped our diet cokes and wine and finished the last of the Dynamite Rolls, I graciously allowed everyone to get off the topic of waxing and eagerly followed the discussion down to the I-5. The I-5 refers to Interstate 5 in Oregon that runs parallel to Eugene, Oregon where most of my girlfriends and I had attended college. I can’t recall how we slid from anal bleaching to our attempts at shutting down a major thoroughfare, but I was enjoying the slide.

The I-5 incident took place during the First Gulf War, a war none of my friends and I supported or could tolerate. While on the East Coast we hopped on many a bus down to D.C. to protest attempts to overturn Roe V. Wade. We had taken the train from our hometown of New Paltz, NY into New York City to attend peace marches led by Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. But this was our first real introduction to organized, grassroots political activism. We tried our best to join the local freedom fighters and add our off-key voices to the collective battle cry.

There were nightly anti-war demonstrations and vigils outside of the Eugene Federal Building. Amy and Kristen were the most involved with local anti-war movement and even had their own “affinity” group. They recounted the various sit-ins and die-ins, the man named “Frog” who was in their affinity group. Frog lived on the streets and made money by telling jokes. There was also a member of their affinity group who called himself “Blue Sky.” “He was a Radical Faerie [a pagan, homosexual organization founded in 1978 by Harry Hay],” Kristen pointed out, “and would always encourage Frog to tell his bad jokes.”

They recalled how our friend Shauna was the only anti-war demonstrator who had the courage to carry through with a planned action outside of the Army Recruitment Center and climb into body bag and stay in it until she was carted off to jail.

“We lived at the Federal building,” recounted Kristen. “Every day, every night we listened to the same speakers speak and listened to the same people sing the same songs.”

Thankfully, Kristen has a memory like a fly-trap and can catch our collective details and experiences in her mental web from fourth grade through college and even into early adulthood. When I see those commercials for organic supplements to enhance memory, I always think that our friends should take up a collection and keep her on a steady supply of natural enhancers so that all of our triumphs and tribulations, most embarrassing moments and memorable quotes will be retained on her human hard-drive.

When it came to I-5, all I remembered was running down an embankment towards the interstate and hearing one of the local anti-war leaders cry “Lay-down!” “Lay your bodies down!”

That would be, lay down in the road. Not just a road, but a major interstate, late at night where there were mostly double and triple trailer tractors roaring through on their way to Portland.

Since we had boiled the motive of the war down to its essence—fuel oil—I guess the point was to protest our dependence on this costly and war-producing fuel and somehow break the bonds of American Imperialism that was currently steam-rolling through Iraq to liberate the great Kuwaiti people who, hitherto, our administration had never given a damn about.

I can recall the smell of oil, the exhaust from the trucks that we had stopped, the feel of rough pavement against my cheek and some strange hippie’s hand being way too close to my butt.

“Was that a planned action?” Amy asked Kristen as we paid our bill and sucked on the orange wedges they provided us. Personally, I was hoping for one of those chocolate dinner mints, but the orange slice would have to do.

“No,” she said, searching her fly-trap for the exact details. “It was a particularly restless night at the Federal Building and we just spontaneously took our protest to the streets. When we came to that embankment that led down to I-5 we all just started running and that woman with the annoying voice screamed at us to lie down.”

I was buffered from the tractor trailer by Kristen and Amy whose noses were actually up against its front grid.

“We did shut that fucker down!” said Amy proudly.

“Yes we did,” said Kristen. “But then that woman got out of her Subaru and said, ‘Hey, I’m against the war too, but I have to pick up my ten year old and twelve year old and they’re twenty minutes away from here. I don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing.’ I felt kind of bad after that.”

None of us remembered how it ended. I thought it started to rain, but then again, it was Oregon, so it was always raining, about to rain, or had just finished raining. Kristen thought that the police showed up and broke up the protest, escorted us off the interstate and got traffic rolling again. Amy agreed on both points—that it started to rain and that the police showed up.

I just remember the exhilarating walk home and Amy, Kristen and I imitating the anti-war leader. “Lay Down! Lay your bodies down!” It was such an empowering statement. I wanted to scream it at random people in random places just to see if they’d do as I asked. I imagined walking into the Trailways Bus Station which was on our way home and ordering ticket holders to “Lay down!” in front of the bus.

“We made the news the next day,” said Kristen.

“We did?” asked Amy and I in unison.

“Yeah. They called it, ‘The Northwest Shutdown.’”

“Did we accomplish anything?” I asked, trying to recall the point, or like the anal-bleaching, the goal?

“We brought attention to the movement!” said Kristen with a laugh. “We made the news, We shut down the I-5. You know, I’m about ready to shut something else down,” she said woefully, reflecting on our current state of War in Iraq, Part 2.

I wished we could just stroll on uptown to Exit 18, bellies full of sushi and shut down the New York State Thruway, or go put sand in the gas tanks of tractors that were currently bulldozing yet another sub-division West of the Wallkill River, near our precious Mohonk Preserve, for a slate of McMansions with matching sheds for the ride-on mowers of the soon-to-be immaculate lawns riddled with pesticides and dandelion free.

Better yet, if I knew how to make a pipe bomb, I could put them into the deep-fryers at McDonalds and Burger King uptown. I’m sure you could learn how to make a pipe bomb on the internet. But I wouldn’t want to accidentally harm a night-time janitor or an innocent fry cook. Those were the kind of unintended consequences that always brought the Weathermen and other Liberation groups down in the 1970s. I mean, it’s not the fry-cooks fault that McDonald’s is cutting down thousands of acres of rain-forest each day? They’re just dipping baskets in grease for minimum wage and are forced to suffer paper hats and polyester pants on top of poor wages.

Just as I was allowing thoughts of I-5 to rekindle my inner-activist, our large-breasted friends announced they had to go.

“Okay, my boobs are about to explode, I have to get home to nurse the baby,” said Jen.

“Me too,” said Sam.

Thankfully, I was just passed the nursing stage as was Kristen. Amy doesn’t have kids but she has a hyper beagle and a hyper husband waiting for her at home. Still, after seeing Jen and Sam off we decided that we could milk the night a few more minutes and enjoy our reveries of our college years.

We sat sipping a cup of coffee at nearby cafe trying to recall just how many people were involved in the Northwest Shutdown.

“I think there were thirty,” said Amy.

“It was smaller than that,” said Kristen.

“Well, there was you two and me,” I offered.

“Was Frog there?” asked Amy.

“Frog was always there,” said Kristen

Like Frog, my friends were always there—whether side by side on an oil streaked highway, on curbside outside a mall, in a sushi restaurant with anal bleaching revelations, or at a slumber party for Amy’s birthday when she turned ten and Kristen and I were the only ones that showed up.

Hell, it doesn’t take more than three to have a party, or shutdown I-5 now does it?

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