Monday, July 11, 2011

How to Feel Bad About Yourself Without Really Trying


Alright.  Where I come from, when you need to go shopping for clothes, the department stores are generally cheaper than those little downtown “boutiques” – especially where underclothes are involved.  Cheaper still might be Kohl’s or even Wallyworld, but in Manhattan, to find a Wallyworld nestled in the midst of all these one-, two-, and three-hundred-year-old buildings would be disheartening, if not downright blasphemous – there would be riots.  And rightly so.  Rock on, New Yorkers!

So that’s what I was thinking when I hopped the 6 train straight to the Bloomingdale’s on 59th to look for a simple strapless bra to wear with my little black & white Angela dress.  I had a lunch date at the Algonquin to look forward to, and I didn’t want any backwoodsy Arizona white trash bra straps peeking out from, well, ANYWHERE.

So there I was, all innocent-like, with no makeup on (and perfectly okay with that), trying to weave my way through the Bloomy’s Sea of Perfume & Makeup Counters in search of the (suspiciously elusive) escalator that would hopefully lead me closer to the lingerie department.  Before I could say Tim Gunn, I found myself suddenly accosted by a Funny & Charming Gay Man in a Suit, who for some reason had singled me out of the crowd for a “quick facial demonstration” (the no makeup thing probably seemed a little pathetic to him.  Or perhaps insulting…)  Alas, he was Funny and Charming and Gay, and in a well-tailored Suit, and was already leading me up toward one of the makeup counters, so I thought, what the heck, this could be fun!  I smiled my thin, lipstickless smile and followed the FCGMS – both of us with a decided spring in our step.

I was plopped onto a sort of highchair for adults and told that someone would be with me shortly (my FCGMS had vanished!) and I quickly found myself face to face with a very thin, middle-aged, scowling Russian woman with black hair, black eyes, and a black outlook on the future of my face.  She scowled at me again and chirped, “Что случилось с вашим лицом?”

“Beg pardon?” I said…

“Vat eez vong vith ur vace?”

“What’s wrong with my face?  Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Jes.  Vat eez vong – vat do joo vant to chenge?”

“um…”

Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “I would sit up straight, look directly into that woman’s black eyes and reply, perhaps even a tiny bit haughtily, ‘There is nothing vong with my face!  Vy are you asking me that?’”

This is wrong.

Vat she – sorry, what she means for you to do is slump a little forward in your highchair, stare dejectedly at the polished floor, and regress to your innermost insecure 15-year-old, when EVERYTHING about your face was just awful and wrong.  And it probably was back then – hormones, that tragic, tousle-haired bad boy in the black leather jacket who wouldn’t talk to you, and that mean, stuck-up little Barbie-doll in your chemistry class can cause horrifying things to happen to a normal young lady’s self-image.  But at age 40 you are long past that now – your hormones have gone dormant (for those of you under 40, the up side to that is hey, no more acne!).  You either married or finally dumped that tragic bad boy (either way, you win), and Barbie is now pushing 320 pounds and living somewhere in Florida with shared custody of her 5 children.  So your instinct is to say, “I’m perfectly happy with my face.  Why do you ask?”

Well, first of all, you’re sitting in an adult-sized highchair waiting for some stranger to come smear a bunch of weird expensive junk all over your face.  There must be SOMETHING wrong with you, or you wouldn’t have let a FCGMS (you should know better – those guys don’t just BFF any old hag that comes along) lead you to sit in a highchair and take this crap.

So I told her things that were sort of still true but not as true as they used to be, such as, “Um, well I don’t like having so many dark freckles on my face, I guess.  I’d like to even out my skin tone,” thinking, wrongly, that I was going to be given a makeup demonstration.  You know – the no makeup thing being a tipoff.  But she was already rubbing some kind of very cold lotion all over my face with her long, bony fingers and interrupting me to point out my dry skin and how zees moiztur veel soffen und even out skeen tone because eet haz witamin D – or something like that. 

She finished rubbing my face, stepped back, scowled, and said, “How do joo like?”

I said very nice, thank you.  Um, very soft.  And um, cool.  And, uh… even-feeling.

She grabbed another, smaller bottle of some goo and started rubbing that under my eyes.  “Ziss veel help make puffy go down under your eyez.”

Wait – puffy under my eyez?  I didn’t tell her I had puffy under my eyez, I said I didn’t like my freckles…

“And ZISS veel help soften lines around here,” she scowled, tracing something on either side of my mouth with the manicured tip of a bony finger…

Lines around my mouth?  I didn’t know there were…

“And ZISS – veddy good to work on lines in forehead…”

WHAT?

So by the time she had finished with me, using about 12 different products to soften ziss and de-puff zat, I was completely horrified with my face.  I sheepishly asked her how much it would cost me to buy the goo that she said would help with the puffiness around my eyez, feeling suddenly disgusted with myself for every single day I’d ever dared to leave the house without makeup on (how could I insult the masses with my natural face?)… I must de-puff my eyes at LEAST. 

“Sixty dollars for the two ounce bottle,” she replied quite plainly.

That’s when it finally kicked in – the urge to laugh.  It suddenly dawned on me – blinding me with the fluorescent makeup-counter light of realization – that these jerks were using the Fear tactic to lure women into buying their products.  If you’re over 35, that is, they use Fear.  I’m sure that the 35 and under age group gets threatened with the other primary sales pitch:  Sex.  Or the possibility that it could lack, thereof.  If you don’t buy this product and use it every day, Young Lady, no one will want to have sex with you and you will dry up an old maid and end up looking like this poor lady next to you with the puffy eyes and the lines around her mouth, and THEN what will become of you?

I stifled the urge to laugh at her because I knew she was just doing her job – she probably works on commission, and was hired to pitch this very schpiel – and mayhap it wasn’t even her idea to use that sort of insult tactic to get women to buy their products – mayhap it was.  But by then her previous insults had (mostly) rolled off me like water from a duck’s tailfeathers.  I politely said, “I’m sorry, that’s a bit out of my price range.”  She continued desperately to try to get me to at least buy the $20 skin cleanser.  I use plain old $2 soap, thank you very much.  Shampoo if I just decide to wash my face in the shower.  Works just fine.  I didn’t tell her that, of course, because I would personally like to cling to the belief that if I do have wrinkles and puffles, it’s because I use shampoo on my face – NOT simply because I’m 40 and can’t do a damn thing about how I look (other than buy $400 per month worth of skin care products to try to counter-terrorize the aging process). 

So I smiled my still thin, lipstickless (but now very moisturized) smile, slid down from the highchair, thanked the now even blacker-eyed Russian lady, and resumed my quest for the escalator. 

I just have one thing to say about the rest of my experience at Bloomingdale’s, but rather than write about it, I will simply illustrate my point with two particular photos I discreetly took with my cell phone while perusing through the clothing section on my way to the lingerie dept. 

Let me first build up to my statement by making another, seemingly unrelated statement about the poverty and horrible conditions that I’ve seen people living in here – in the subways, on the street corners, in the parks, and in the doorways of closed-down shops.  Let me remind everyone of the fact that there are people who can’t afford braces for their teenager or even stitches for their child who cut himself badly on the playground and will have to live with a scar for the rest of his life.  Or the elderly who lost their pensions years ago and can’t afford to buy cereal, much less the medications they may need.  And now let me illustrate my point about the Bloomingdale’s of New York and the people who actually shop there:

Really neat, stylish skirt at Bloomingdale’s – for casual, everyday wear around town or at the office:


Price tag of casual everyday skirt:

Enough said.

The end.


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