By Marin Resnick

Sexy sandals and sweltering summer weather brought an eccentric bunch to my favorite cheap nail salon on 23rd Street last Friday night. For a dirt-a-phobe like me, I looked forward to my bi-monthly rite of cleansing and relaxation.

After a 20-minute wait I was seated in the pedicure pit. As an astute New Yorker, I knew not to make eye contact. So I stared at my toes thinking about the grossness of this process. Looking down at the basin where I placed my feet, I feared it wasn’t really clean. I hadn’t seen anyone scrub that bin since I sat down. As I moved my size seven feet from the water to the foot stand, I gazed at the tools the woman used to trim and clean my nails. Was someone else’s nasty toe fungus still on there? Yuck, I’m so freaky about germs that I always made my boyfriend of three years shower before we had sex, I was not the type to let some dirty clipper touch my well-groomed nails. My thoughts of Paula Abdul’s flesh-eating bacterial infection she got from unsanitary equipment.

In my obsessive-compulsive moment, I didn’t realize that a music video vixen was next to me until I noticed her Louis Vuitton purse. I asked if it was a Chinatown knock off. These days, the fakes look so real that even my WASPY friends don’t buy the real deal.

The video diva, annoyed by my question, said “I got it at the Louis Vuitton store.” After the snarl, I took a good look at her and recognized her face from MTV where she had shaken her tits and ass, which appeared a lot larger on my 37-inch tube. I said, “Oh, it’s nice,” attempting to redeem myself. You’re so Elaine I thought, a real yenta. Actually, my sister-in-law calls me Lainie because of my crazy curls and obscure personality.

I went back to staring at my adorable nubs being polished. I was always impressed by them because, unlike the rest of my body, they were always perfectly petite, no matter how much water weight I retained.

I noticed a young girl who resembled one of Tony Soprano’s coked up stripper chicks in sunglasses at 8 p.m. and cowboy boots despite 80-degree weather. Her gold nails were still wet so I helped her take off her boots, and we became instant friends.

Video diva, stripper chick and I moved from the pedicure pits to the manicure cubicles. The diva was on her speakerphone complaining about how this guy she met wouldn’t leave her alone. “He just wants to get back with me,” she grumbled. After hanging up, video diva moaned to the manicurist about her new boyfriend’s children, whom he had to go see every weekend, “Why do I have share a man with his kids? I just want a man of my own without any other obligations.” Didn’t she realize how lucky she was to find a guy spending time with his kids instead of getting drunk or watching Chicks with Dicks. I had beautiful gal pals who wound up with men who either didn’t have jobs or had some form of addiction—be it heroine or porn, and here she was, a woman who shook her Laffy Taffy for a living with two men chasing after here. Life wasn’t fair.

Distraught by video diva’s apparent luck in life, I turned my attention to stripper chick, who was bellyaching that the gold on her fingers looked less brown than the gold on her toes. Her boy-toy was on his mobile next to her, confirming his plans to attend a downtown party. “It’s going to be really cool,” he said, “I’m with my beautiful friend who’ll hopefully come with me tonight.” In the middle of this commotion, she looked at my nails and said, “I like your polish better. Look, don’t you like her polish better?” He nodded while still blabbing. She slid over to show me her nails. 

Upset because my nails looked nicer than hers, stripper chick told the Asian nail lady to put on an additional coat of gold. Aggravated by the request, the woman spoke to her counterparts in what I assume to be Chinese. It was just like the Seinfeld episode where Elaine swears that the ladies say mean things about her in Chinese so she won’t understand them. As funny as that episode was, it was much funnier to see live manicurists hover around making faces of disgust and speaking words that I was sure were x-rated. Stripper chick was still bitching about her nails when she arrived at the dryer stations.

I felt lucky to afford an hour pampering session and privileged to be part of my own urban sitcom. For this overly cultured 30-year-old New Yorker used to first class works of art, there was no healthier form of entertainment.