Although I try, really try, not to offer up too many craven commercial endorsements in this space, I have occasionally sung the praises of the fine, fine superfine British beauty company known as Lush. Although it is an 11-year-old company and I would occasionally come across a mention of it in the beauty mags, I had never been to Lush until last year, when Lloyd and I were in Scotland. On our last day in Edinburgh, I had planned to buy tea and little candies for my office buddies. On our way to the tea salon on Princes Street, we walked by a Lush storefront, its door open. "Oh, honey, do you mind if I pop in here for a second?," I asked, and it was the beginning of the end for me, especially when the lovely shopgirl announced that there were two Lush shops in Manhattan alone. I am a mad fool for the Upper West Side Lush shop, the closest thing I have ever had to my own personal Cheers, where everybody shouts "Norm!" as I walk through the door. (Actually, no, they don't, because Norm is not my name, but you know what I mean, dear friends.) Since I have started shopping at Lush, my face is prettier, my hair is shinier, and I smell like a million bucks, as does my apartment; there is something really lovely about entering a cool apartment on a hot day, or a warm apartment on a freezing day, and inhaling the fragrance of oranges, or mint and apple, or jasmine and vertivert, or toffee.
One of my favorite things to buy at Lush, and the subject of today's anecdote, is a massage bar, a solid fragrant form that looks like soap, but melts at body temperature into a potent, fragrant oil. You rub it between your hands until they get good and shiny; you rub the offending muscle, or offending muscles, or better yet, you get a loved one to do it for you; or you decide you'd like to use a little massage oil in place of your regular cologne and rub it on your wrists; life is good. I keep bars of them in my desk to use as hand lotion, as a dry skin lotion for my elbows, or as a balm for my stiff neck and shoulders when I've been working on the computer for five hours without stopping. At present, I have two bars in my desk, a floral, vaguely spicy one called Therapy (the original, flagship Lush massage bar), and a beautiful one called Absolution, filled with vanilla and tonka bean. Absolution has been discontinued and I am heartbroken about it. When I heard it was being discontinued, I bought about a dozen bars, one or two at a time, and stashed them in my freezer. One day I went to the shop and discovered that the remaining dozen or so bars were gone; when I asked what happened, the store manager said that they had been accidentally left too close to a heat source, and they had all melted. I was heartbroken all over again. I keep hoping to hear that Lush has reconsidered, and will bring it back someday. They have been known to do this.
Thursday afternoon found myself and the other sales-y cubicle dwellers on a conference call to discuss our upcoming Spiffy New Software Rollout; by the end of the call we were dazed and groggy, in need of strong, fortifying libation, but we had none about in the office. I sat down at my desk, listened to my neck crackle as I moved my head from side to side, and rubbed my sore trapezius. Mmmm, massage bars, I thought, and pulled out both the Therapy bar, wrapped in a silk scarf, and the Absolution bar, kept ignominiously in the now-battered plastic bag in which it had been sold to me. I sniffed each one, thought a moment, and then, unwittingly, uttered out loud the single greatest straight line I have ever said in my life:
"I can't tell what I really need right now. Do I need Therapy? Or do I need Absolution?"
Dear friends, I really, really need to remind myself that my friends, neighbors and loved ones are not subject to the internal dialogues I carry on with myself in my head, and what sounds perfectly reasonable in that context sounds quite different to anyone who can't read my mind. Either that, or I need to remind myself that they're not laughing at me, they're laughing with me.