Manscaping and highbrowisms.

*Warning:  100% non-medical post ahead. Proceed with caution.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy. Crazy, do you hear me?  Craziness at home, craziness at work, craziness all over the place. Whenever my life gets crazy, some of those quasi-important-to-me-but-not-really-important-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things items get placed squarely on the back burner. They bubble and overflow and sometimes even scorch on the bottom. But when life gets too crazy, that's just the way it has to be.

What things qualify? Oh lots of things.  But one in particular that I have really let get out of hand during these past few weeks was eyebrow grooming. Yeah, I said it. Eyebrow grooming.

So. In the craziness of all this craziness,  my brows started looking a little something like this:

What you know about Andy Rooney and 60 minutes?

Okay, okay.  Maybe not quite as bad as ol' Andy Rooney's are, but you get the idea. Anyways.  As some of you may remember, thanks to one of my greatest Grady adventures of all time, I have this amazing place I go to here in Atlanta for eyebrow grooming. It's this place that uses thread to neatly shape your brows to natural-but-not-Curious-George-looking perfection.  And if you don't know the story behind me and the eyebrow threaders at Hair Images, if you have absolutely nothing important to do with your time, read this.

Now. I know somebody somewhere is reading this thinking--really? Eyebrow grooming? What could be more unimportant? Oh, and someone else who is new to this blog is like, "Wait--I thought when so-and-so told me to check out this blog she said it was about medicine and other medical coolness?"

First, I'll say that--yes, eyebrows are not exactly life-or-death. But for whatever reason, up until I met the Karate Kid, I had been in hot pursuit of the perfect eyebrow groomers. And the key to the perfect eyebrow groomer is one that makes you look neat and natural but not surprised.

Hello?  You still with me?  Good.

Okay. As for the new person reading this blog, sigh. . . .okay.  I may as well come clean and let you know that while a good deal of the material found on this blog is medical-adventure related, a fair amount isn't at all. But in my defense. . . .I think life and all of the observations we make in it go together like a big tossed salad. Like, noticing something in the grocery store or the hair salon isn't that different from doing a double take in the hospital during a physical exam.  

Uhhhh, okay. Where was I?  Oh! Eyebrows.  Okay, so finally on Friday, I get some free time to tend to eyebrow grooming. I grab my Nook e-reader and head over to Hair Images for a walk-in appointment.

Now let me tell you--this place stays packed.  It used to be the well-kept secret of all of the gorgeous Indian and Pakistani girls in Atlanta, but eventually everyone else caught on. (All of my Indian and Pakistani sisters are nodding right now going, Mmmmm hmmm!)  Even if you have an appointment, the wait is bananas, so you have to come ready to be patient.

What's made it even worse, though, is that NOW it isn't just the dreadlocked sistas and the blonde sorority girls getting in on the act. Now there's DUDES up in the spot, too. Yes. Dudes.  And not just the androgynous types or the Ru Paul types, either. I've seen the most regular-looking joe hunched over with elbows resting on wide open knees and thumbing through magazines. Periodically looking up and wanting to yell out, "Hey! I got next!"

Confused, are you?  Let me let you in on a little secret.   . . . .shhhhh. . . . they call it. . .wait for it. . . .ah hem. . . .

Manscaping.  (Sorry. Just threw up in my mouth a little bit.)

Yeah. Manscaping.  Shaping up those renegade eyebrows and sometimes even waxing ears. No. I ain't kidding.

Now before you even ask--the answer is NO. The B.H.E.  is not a manscaper, but I can honestly say that if Harry did have a monobrow, I doubt that he wouldn't at least consider it.

Okay, so I'm telling you ALL OF THAT to tell you about what happened when I was getting my brows done Friday.  I walk in and the lady I usually see isn't there. I've been coming long enough to know who is the next best thing, and who to avoid. So I survey the situation. There's the new lady who seems hit or miss, the lady who used to do my brows but who I really think needs reading glasses because she kept leaving big holes in my brows and then there's the lady that has the station next to my lady who does a really decent job. I sign up for the lady-next-to-my-lady and took my seat to wait.

But wait--there's more!

Right beside HER is this other woman who I did try once when my lady (and the backup lady) were gone. She left my eyebrows so thin that I looked ten years older (and like a black version of Pamela Anderson's scary brows.)

Anyways. I call her the butcher-brow lady and have waited a full extra 45 minutes to avoid her. And everyone she does gets the thin treatment. Lucky for her, some folks seem to like that Pamela Anderson-just-got-electrocuted-Curious George look so she gets her share of clientele. Good for her.

Anyways.

So check it. I'm reading my Nook e-reader and minding my business when this hyper-masculine yet hyper-hairy dude comes in and sits beside me in the waiting area. I glance over and notice that he definitely has the unibrow thing going on so he's in the right place. He was good looking, too. I know I'm married and all, but I can still say that this guy was pretty easy on the ol' eyeballs--unibrow and all. I couldn't place his ethnicity. . . .Persian or Armenian or Sicilian? I wasn't sure.  He was wearing some kind of keg party frat shirt and looked a little uncomfortable with all of the estrogen in the room.  But, baby?  That unibrow needed attention--he wasn't going anywhere.

Okay, so y'all! You know what happened next. Of course you do!

Like this, but less shmancy

Now, the way this spot is set up is basically with five chairs on the right and five on the left. Everyone waiting can see everything that's going on (with the exception of these private rooms where allegedly the waxing goes on.) Anyways. . .So lady-next-to-my-lady calls me and I go to her chair. I'm laying in my seat with my chin tilted up ready to get my eyebrow groom on.

That's when it happened. Yes, it did. The butcher-brow lady calls Frat dude!  It was like she called his name in slow motion. . . . .

"F---r---aaaaaa-----ttt D--oooooooo-d!" (insert vacuous echo here)

Gasp! I almost sat up in my seat when I heard her call him; I felt like it was my civic duty to warn him that this woman does not believe in "cleaning up the strays" and "shaping things up."  Lady-next-to-my-lady freezes and gives me the hairy eyeball (no pun intended.)  I settle back down and (literally) start praying for Frat boy's siamese brows after deciding that jumping in front of butcher-brow lady's chair would be inappropriate.

Lord, please don't let her over thread him. Please don't let her overpluck him.

I strain and hear him mutter a few lines about "just make them look neater" and "you know, the middle part."  She cheerily obliges.  I narrow my eyes and curl my lips because that's exactly what she said to me before she had me looking like a seventy year old woman. Poor Frat boy. I continued my prayer.

Lord, for real. Don't let her butcher his brows, okay? I mean, if that's Your will and all.

So, I lay there until my eyebrows are done. I sit up and look in the mirror. Not as good as my-lady but it's the next best thing and waaaay better than when I got there.  As she hands me my ticket, from the corner of my eye I see butcher-brow lady handing Frat dude the hand mirror. What happened next scratched the needle all the way across the record. I heard him growl under his breath--but not so low that nosy me couldn't hear him:

"What the f%#@!?!?"

I swung my head in his direction and saw what the expletive was about. And boy was it warranted.

OM-expletive-G. This was a disaster. His brows were--as my friend David calls it-- "all the way snatched!" 

Okay, so obviously God had bigger things to deal with because that prayer didn't EVEN get answered in my favor. Well. . . on second thought. . . maybe I should have been more specific. Frat dude's eyebrows weren't nearly as bad my Pam Anderson-scary-Curious-George disaster of 2009. . . in fact they were lovely. . . .had he been a woman.  Perfectly arched and perfectly groomed. But too perfect for a dude's dude. Overly intentional in their appearance, in their exquisite precision, and the absolute antithesis of what a dude wants in his manscape.  

"I can fix it," she said to him.  And I was thinking exactly what he said next.

"Fix it?!?"  

Awww hells nawww! 

Dang. Frat boy looked like he was going to cry up in there. And you know? He had good reason to. Those brows were a hot mess. For real. I mean the dude looked. . . .well. . .the dude looked like a lady.  Poor Frat dude. Poor, poor Frat dude. I felt so bad. Like I should have stopped him, but I was trying (for once) to watch my own lane.

To make matters worse, his girlfriend or whatever she was walks in as he is paying at the counter. She stands there studying his face as his face grows redder and redder.  Finally, she can't take it.

"Dude.  Your eyebrows look. . . .oh my gosh, dude."

She snickered a bit and covered her mouth realizing when she saw him looking tearful that this was not a good thing to say.  And out they walked. Her staring at him with her hands over her mouth and him sulking out like he'd just been branded on the cheek with the scarlet letters PTDQ (for part-time drag queen.)

Wow.

I still feel kind of bad, y'all. Should I have stopped him or was it none of my business? And is it awful that I wish I'd gotten a picture of his brows and that I couldn't wait to blog about it? Awful, I know.

See? These are the important things I have to think of when I get some time off from Grady.

***
Happy Sunday, y'all. 

P.S.  Harry insists that I did not do my civic duty and that I should have intervened. But I'm saying--what was I supposed to do? Say it right in front of butcher-brow lady?  He laughed so hard that I thought he would be sick and kept saying, "Babe, you're dead wrong! You're supposed to help people--you're a doctor!"  (And then he laughs louder and harder.)

Hmm. I guess.

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