What Possessed Me???: August 7, 2011

I was reflecting back on my glorious cosmetics career, which I worked very hard at. Although with a mortgage of my own, I sometimes struggled to pay my NY Telephone bill. God, remember the days before deregulation?

When your monthly bill could cause asphyxiation upon opening it? Between film that you dropped off to be developed and this, well no wonder most people in their 20’s were thin.

In my new-found freedom of home ownership, I was very careful with my pennies. There was little to go around and I didn’t have the luxury of sopping up luxuries. However, I did have a creative brain. In my career, I ate in the finest Manhattan restaurants, three times a day, on good days. Couldn’t always pay that electric bill, but damn, I was well, well fed. Along those lines, I noticed that I was in the minority of my friends, when it came to weight gain. I was a major. A major porker. Well, kinda. I was getting there. Eating four times a week at my favorite restaurant, Felidia (http://www.felidia-nyc.com/)…

It is owned by Lidia

Bastianich, you know…the Italian Mama on PBS who is NOW willing to show you just how inexpensive it is to prepare a gourmet Italian feast…mainly in MANHATTAN. Anyhow, although it took some crackerjack nutritional detective work on my part, I quickly surmised that I could not:

1. Eat homemade pasta four times a week.

2. Eat homemade pasta four times a week, plus the entire loaf of

‘Bronx bread’

that was put in front of my face. Isn’t this food grouping? Hey. Doesn’t the sautéed broccoli rabe in my pasta count for anything??

Because all of this dining was part of my job in Media Advertising, I realized that I quickly needed a new plan to meet the ever-growing needs of my diminished budget and my ever-increasing waistline. For all of the magazine reps that would call on me to join them for lunch, I proposed a brand-new day. I told these Ladies that I was no longer consuming food. Yep. This was my opening statement. They did not need to know about what I concocted on weekends, in my expensive co-op apartment in Mount Kisco…it wasn’t the point. During my lunch hours, food would no longer be on my plate: Luxuries would. Heck, we’re in the cosmetics industry. Whatcha say we go visit some of those? My proposal was simple. I could no longer have carb-induced coma-like 3:00pm’s,

so if you’d like to meet to talk about business, grow our relationship and try to wean a few hundred thousand dollars of Revlon’s media budget for your magazine’s ad revenue, meet me at The Stressless Step. Oh my God. Twenty years since I’ve been there and I still feel tranquil typing that name.

I was a trail-blazer, in the ad sales industry. Everyone loved this idea and they were stealing it from me...liberally.
I had to pass The Plaza Hotel to get to it. It was right next to The Ritz Carlton Hotel, or sort of in it. Not sure. The main door was on Central Park West.

“The Stress Less Step is located in New York, NY. They offer various types of massage, facials, body treatments such as body wraps, aromatherapy, waxing, skin exfoliation, acupressure, acupuncture, hydrotherapy, sauna treatments, steam bath treatments, and hot tub treatments.”

As I pasted in the description of what they actually offer, I can’t help but notice that they left out an important service:
Reflexology.

According to Wikipedia: Reflexology, or zone therapy, is an alternative medicine involving the physical act of applying pressure to the feet, hands, or ears with specific thumb, finger, and hand techniques without the use of oil or lotion. It is based on what reflexologists claim to be a system of zones and reflex areas that they say reflect an image of the body on the feet and hands, with the premise that such work effects a physical change to the body.^[1] A 2009 systematic review of randomized controlled trials concludes that "The best evidence available to date does not demonstrate convincingly that reflexology is an effective treatment for any medical condition."^[2]There is no consensus among reflexologists on how reflexology is supposed to work; a unifying theme is the idea that areas on the foot correspond to areas of the body, and that by manipulating these one can improve health through one's qi.^[3] Reflexologists divide the body into ten equal vertical zones, five on the right and five on the left.^[4] Concerns have been raised by medical professionals that treating potentially serious illnesses with reflexology, which has no proven efficacy, could delay the seeking of appropriate medical treatment.^[5]

I guess it was the lawyers. Always the lawyers. I believe if you got the legal documents for T.S.S., you’d find my name listed, as the last human customer to receive this luxury service. The lawsuit shut it down. No, not my suit. The Reflexology Tech’s suit. I damn near killed her. This woman immigrated from some God-forsaken land with an -uz and a stan at the end of it:

She had survived famine, civil war, genocide. She survived all of that to come to the land of milk and honey, only to have her heart stopped cold by the stress-level of a girl with too many carbs in her life. Ok. I’ll give.

I admit it. I was a massage junkie. Couldn’t get enough. But on one of these visits, the massage therapist had just run past me, with her coat on and a token in her hand.

“Heyyyyyyy!!! Where are you going??? I’m your 1:15!!” And she was gone. By the time my female business lunch companion and I made it to the concierge desk, the owner was explaining that ‘my gal’ just had a call from home and obviously, had to go. As I stood there, feeling like a stressed-out orphan, the owner suggested that since my date and I both had appointments for full body massages, “Why not one of you today, to try something different?” Her Russian-inflected English told me to run, but I was just stupider, back in the day.

“Like what? What is synonymous with having every inch (almost) of my tired, aching body rubbed for an hour?” “Re-flex-o-logy,” she phonetically sounded out for me, as if I didn't speak the language. Isn’t that where they rub your feet, hitting particular points, that correlate to say, my liver? Oh hell no. Leave my liver alone. “You love….I promise you,” she promised me.

Since my very CONCERNED lunch mate was already standing in front of me in her little robe and slippers,

I figured I was S.O.L. or it was time to pony up my piggies.

I was more than a little vexed at my circumstances. Not that I had any problem with the technique. I read a little something, somewhere about it. But I just couldn’t see how this would be good enough to replace a full-body massage and leave me Zenlike.

Unless they did it like 10 or 15 times, in the span of an hour? Apparently, I was without a clue.

So, my now available technician, from that far-off land of woes, was now touching my toes. Cheesy, Sue…Just plain cheesy.

Anyway, she led me into a room, the literal size of a broom closet, if the brooms weren’t stored there. My first bedroom, with my queen-sized bed was bigger than this. There is enough space for, and I quote:

1. A Massage CHAIR. They couldn’t even fit in a full table.

2. An extremely narrow side table, which housed a

radio/cassette player. God I’m old.

3. A milking stool for Helga to sit on. I think she brought it with her from the old country. It was metal and you could tell that many yaks had been de-milked, while someone sat on it and continuously took from them.

4. A door to the room.

Okay, so this is a little easier to prepare for. I took off my high-heels and sat down. No muss, no fuss. So far, so good. Helga gently held my head and neck, as she cranked back the chair, until I was not quite supine, but close to it. She dimmed the lights like it was a Dutch Brothel.

She pressed the play button and something the likes of what Yanni and his Yak-hearding cousin might have collaborated on,

started to fill my ears. “Ooh, this is very nice,” I said to myself, as Helga was oiling up my stinky feet (hey, I had to pound the pavement, to get to this joint…). “I really don’t think, however, that it will be enough to decrease my stres….clohhfdffuroerfdfd.” Snoring is pouring out of me, as those were the last things I recalled saying.

The last thing I recalled seeing was Helga,
perched on her milking stool,

with her back shoved up against the metal door to the room, as there did not remain an inch for the Holy Spirit. Here’s how I became the last human consumer of Reflexology at The Stressless Step:

Apparently, somewhere around the 57^th -minute in, Side A of the New Age cassette finished. Since this was back in the old, old days, the tape had to be physically removed and flipped to the B Side, to continue listening to the rest. When Side A finished, it did not simply fade out…the cassette player CLICKED OFF like a gun-shot: