Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (48 page)

Weird Spa Treatments

Spas are more popular than ever; there are currently about 14,000 of them in the United States alone, and the yearly growth rate for new spas is around 16 percent—150 million people visited spas in 2007.

The two main purposes for those visits are relaxation and beautification, so atmosphere and treatments have tended toward soft and soothing: lots of white towels, quiet New Age music, and gentle pats and pulls. In the past few years, though, spas and their treatment menus have taken a turn for the stimulating.

Shiatsu is an ancient form of massage that involves isolating pressure points on the body and making their release relax other muscles. In 1980, Harold Dull, a Shiatsu practitioner, considered how the technique might work if it were conducted in the water. “Watsu,” or “water shiatsu,” was born.

In a watsu treatment, you arrive at a small, round pool in your bathing suit and meet a suited-up massage therapist who uses your body (if you don’t float easily, you can attach small floats to your wrists and ankles) to manipulate your muscles through a series of balletic movements. It’s not for the shy!

Biting into a fresh blintz topped with beluga or osetra is a pleasure for many. Having your face covered with a paste of fresh caviar
might not be as great a pleasure (really, it’s just a paste, and it doesn’t smell), but it is food for the skin: the anti-aging properties of fish eggs make this the “Cadillac of facials.” Make that the QE2 of facials . . .

It’s not an urban legend: Israeli massage therapist Ada Barak really does offer “snake massage,” allowing her six nonvenomous snakes to slither across clients’ backs to untangle their knotted muscles. Barak uses the California and Florida king, milk, and corn snakes because she believes that people find contact with living creatures soothing.

The Qua Spa in Las Vegas has something a little different: a “cold room” complete with artificial snow. For anyone who’s ever experienced a real Nordic sauna, this won’t seem like too much of a shock: cooling down rapidly after a sauna or hot tub soak can be invigorating. With mint-scented air, snow drifting from the ceiling, and an ice fountain, this spa feature has a certain . . . je ne sais “Qua.”

It might smell and feel as if you’re being coated in thick, rich chocolate, but the Chocolate Fondue Wrap at Spa Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania, is actually a mixture of skin-renewing “moor mud” (the mud of European moors) and cocoa essence. Chocolate spa treatments have become so popular that chocolate-scented lotions, gels, powders, and candles are available in most bath and beauty stores. Just don’t try nibbling on the candy bar-shaped soaps.

Many a man might believe a beer bath to be the height of happiness, but the Bodvar Brewery Spa in the Czech Republic doesn’t offer beer baths so the bather can get a buzz from the fumes. It’s so he or she can enjoy circulatory and exfoliant benefits for the skin. (Anyone who wants a buzz at Bodvar can access a tub-side bar, ready to dispense a pint of the cold stuff to enhance the warm bath.)

Ear candling has been around for centuries, but in the last couple of decades it’s become a “hot” spa treatment. A therapist at the spa inserts a narrow cone of waxed muslin into the spa-goer’s ear and then lights the other end. The gentle suction supposedly draws out earwax and debris. Medical professionals have their doubts about whether or not ear candling is effective, but they believe when done by a spa or medical professional it’s harmless.

Cupping is a form of acupressure in which a flame is used to create a vacuum between a small glass cup and a person’s skin. It can leave large, red, circular welts, but its fans swear by the treatment, saying it raises their energy levels and reduces musculoskeletal pain. Many spas now offer cupping treatments, and there are various methods. One that should never be considered in a spa setting is the old practice of “wet cupping,” in which a small slit is cut in the skin, first. That can cause infection. So if you see your aesthetician with a scalpel, run the other way.

We’ve all heard about the benefits of tannins for the inside of the body, but now we can experience them on the outside. Cleopatra supposedly bathed in red wine, and the Hakone Yunessun Spa west of Tokyo, Japan, allows visitors to bathe in a pool that mixes water with Beaujolais Nouveau. The pool is replenished several times a day. The rest of the day, a 3.6 meter faux wine bottle “pours” and aerates the spa waters. Visitors can also drink glasses of the red wine while they soak.

Got eczema? Psoriasis? The fish are ready to see you . . . the
garra rufa
or “doctor fish” footbath has become popular at many Asian spas. Soak your feet in shallow water while dozens of tiny doctor fish nibble away at the dead skin. According to one spa’s Web site, the doctor fish cleaning “is not painful, because fishes have no teeth.”

Great Opening Lines from Novels

The first line of a book can tell you a lot about the rest of story. For example, when you read the opening line of
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” you know that you’re in for a comedy of manners that will include discussions of marriage.

Other times, the first line of a book tells you almost nothing, but is so intriguing and seductive that you want to keep reading to find out more. For example, Toni Morrison’s opening line for
Beloved
—“124 was spiteful” leaves you wondering . . . Who or what is 124? Why was 124 spiteful? What has been done to 124? You’re hooked.

Getting hooked is the universal truth about great first lines. When you read one, you know you’re in the hands of a great writer.

The opening line mentioned above from
Pride and Prejudice
says many things with just one sentence: Austen declared her subject to be courtship and marriage, established an ironic tone, and set the scene for a “chase” between men and women. We may already know that Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy—but this line makes us eager to know how that ending came to be.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way.” How did Leo Tolstoy know there would be so many memoirs written in the 21st century? This first line of his great work
Anna Karenina
is meant to ground the Karenin family in its own particular torment, but its psychological truth is so powerful that it is quoted by people who have never even read the novel.

First doesn’t always mean brief:

Thus begins Charles Dickens’s 1859
A Tale of Two Cities
, about the French Revolution. Even without its famous twin closing line (“It is a far, far better thing to do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”), this line sets the tone perfectly for a story of all these things battling within two lookalike but very different men: Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton.

There’s no doubt about what is driving the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s book: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” Sounds like a steamy romance, says the reader—and then he discovers that the fire of Humbert Humbert’s loins is all of 12 years old. Cue the “ew” factor, but by this time, you’re less focused on Lolita’s youth and more fascinated by Humbert’s reckless, life-shattering compulsion.

Sometimes an opening line gains status as a saying stripped of its original context. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L. P. Hartley in his 1953 novel
The Go-Between
(adapted into a 1971 movie by playwright Harold Pinter). Does anyone read Hartley any more, except for a students of Modern British Literature? But Hartley’s opening line captures an essential human truth, especially for the English. Disillusioned by
World War I, exhausted by World War II, and tired from still-imposed rationing, to them the past was vanished.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Holden Caulfield, the 20th century’s most famous teenager, began his story:

You’re hooked and want to know what Mr. Caulfield will tell you.

“It was a pleasure to burn,” begins Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic
Fahrenheit 451
. His protagonist, Fireman Guy Montag, is talking about burning books. However, Bradbury wasn’t talking about the kind of book burning the Nazis did, or about censorship. He said famously that his book was about what happens when people come to rely more on television for their information and forget about facts. In that case, Bradbury implied, you might as well burn all the books because they take up space and getting rid of them becomes a productive task . . . like mowing the lawn or filing papers.

When Kurt Vonnegut opened his groundbreaking
Slaughterhouse-Five
with the sentence “All this is true, more or less,” he wasn’t yet speaking in the voice of the novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, but in his own. One of the things that make this sci-fi modernist novel so important is that it’s also the story of the author trying to come to terms with his participation as a young soldier in the firebombing of Dresden during World War II and his incarceration in a German prisoner-of-war camp. What was true? What was false? Even the narrator wasn’t sure.

“In the town, there were two mutes, and they were always together,”
begins
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
, Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel. Although the book has three distinct parts, this sentence gives us the place, its oddness, and its sense of community. The two deaf men, Spiros and John, are true outcasts: one is an immigrant and mentally unstable; the other is a possible Jew, and a possible homosexual. McCullers was an early bard of the underdog, and this memorable first line emphasizes her quiet compassion.

Alice Walker’s 1982
The Color Purple
was a literary landmark for several reasons: its attention to individual fates of African Americans, its sensitivity to different kinds of sexuality, and in large part because of its masterful use of dialect. The opening line is “You better not never tell nobody but God.” The double negative, the urgency, and the reference to a divinity all indicate a novel concerned with authenticity rather than style.

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” No, it’s not a line from Dr. Seuss; it’s the opening of
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
by James Joyce, published in 1916. Readers know immediately that this is a book unlike any other, and that’s the point: you either keep reading or you don’t. Joyce has no need to pander or seduce—he’s truly the artist, all grown up.

“Call me Ishmael,” wrote Herman Melville in 1851 as the beginning to
Moby Dick
, his epic story of man versus whale. But why has this simple declaration remained so famous and so compelling? By telling us immediately that he is adopting the name of a Biblical orphan, the narrator indicates he’s an outsider and may not view events in the same way as the other characters.

Given that opening lines are so often memorable, it was inevitable
that someone would start lampooning them. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest can be found online at
www.bulwer-lytton.com
, “Where WWW means ‘Wretched Writers Welcome.’”

Why Bulwer-Lytton? You may not recognize the name, but you’ll certainly recognize the opening line, from Edgar Bulwer-Lytton’s (justly) forgotten 1830 novel
Paul Clifford
:

Such extravagant prose, so many digressions, and so little information apart from the fact that a) it’s raining and b) we’re in London. No wonder San Jose State University professor Scott Rice chose Bulwer-Lytton as the figurehead for his bad-writing contest, held annually since 1982.