Steamy

Author’s Note: For many of my readers tonight marks the start of Rosh Hashanah.  May the upcoming Jewish New Year bring you good health, peace and joy.

Whew.  The last week here in Chicago has been so sticky.  And icky. Really hot and unbearably humid.

Think a dry cleaner.

In New Orleans.

(I know.  I know.  No whining.  In another month this town’s temperature is going to take a header for Siberia.)

But as summer belatedly- and reluctantly- gives up the ghost, I am reminded of my time in some other steam baths.

So get undressed, grab a towel and get on to the massage table.

Are you a spa enthusiast?

Does the mere thought of saunas and cold plunges, soothing oils and aromatherapy soothe your weary, angst-ridden body?

Not me, brother.

I am spa-aphobic.  The very thought of locker rooms, rubdowns and big wicker towel baskets makes me break out into a cold sweat.

I have had some very un-relaxing times at some of these places.  Didn’t enjoy the experience at all.

You might even say that they rubbed me the wrong way.

My first close encounter with a loofa took place in the early ’70’s.  I was married to a guy from Baltimore who thought that massages and steam baths were the nth degree of Nirvana.  To that end, he was always pestering me to join him in his quest for the perfect masseur/masseuse.

The thought of a stranger touching me anywhere gave me the creeps but, then as now, I subscribed to the “Duchess of Windsor” philosophy.

One can never be too rich or too thin.

So with weight loss fixed firmly in my little mind, I agreed to spend a weekend with him at the Harbor Island Spa in New Jersey.

I can vividly remember the jaunty television theme song of “The Odd Couple” playing as I nervously shed my clothes. (First making sure that I had the locker room all to myself.)

Clutching my towel in a death grip, I reluctantly climbed on what looked to me nothing less than a ob/gyn’s examining table.

A hefty woman with beefy forearms immediately threw herself on me.   She pounded and kneaded and and worked my my protesting flesh into pasta dough.  I clenched my teeth and prayed that it would soon be all over.

Ten endless minutes later, it was.

“You’re more tense now than when I started,” she shook her her head ruefully.

“Yeah, I don’t think massage is really for me,” I conceded.  “What else do you have?”

“Our clientele find the steam room very relaxing.  Perhaps you would care to give that a try?” she suggested.

Gratefully I climbed off the torture rack and she pointed the way to the steam room.

It was hard to see in there.  It was filled with steam, after all.  But I manfully groped my way in and laid down on one of the benches.

Not so bad in here, I smugly thought.  I can do this

Safety Tip Sidebar: My Baltimore husband had warned me.  “You’re not used to steam and you have to build up your tolerance.  So only give it a try for five or ten minutes.  No more,” he had cautioned me.

But if five or ten minutes in the steam room could work wonders, what could fifteen minutes do?

Visions of even more pounds dropping off effortlessly floated in my head and I thought, “I can take this terrible heat.  It’s worth it!”

But my positive thinking was soon interrupted by the sound of women’s voices.

And they were making snide comments like “Oh, that looks so hard.” Or “I wonder what she thinks she’s doing?”

I didn’t get what or who they were talking about.  And this constant stream of disapproving and vocal spectators seemed to be coming from a room just off the steam room.

Curiosity won out over sloth and I reluctantly got off the bench and followed the sound of the comments.  They led me to a steam-surrounded door.

Which I cautiously opened…

And saw…

The actual stream room.  I had been sweating it out in the changing room before you got to the steam room.

One second of the hellish blast was enough to send me scampering for my towel-clad life.

My god, it was HOT.

I did a reverse Dita Von Teese and I was outta there faster than you could say “Slimfast.”

The experience scarred me for years.  It took lots of negotiating for my next husband to talk me into a healthy stay at La Costa outside of San Diego.

Very swanky, as you can see, and Pancho Segura was the tennis pro at that time.

(A very big drawing card for my physically-fit tennis-loving health nut of a husband.)

ICYMI:  Here’s the score on Senor Segura courtesy of Wikipedia:

In 1962, on the recommendation of good friend, Mike Franks, Segura became the teaching professional at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. replacing Carl Earn. Most of Pancho’s students were movie stars such as Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Julie Andrews, Richard Conte, Shelley Winters, Charlton Heston, Barbra Streisand, Dina Merrill, Kirk Douglas, Robert Evans, Lauren Bacall, Gene Hackman, Carl Reiner, Barbara Marx, George C. Scott, Janet Leigh, and Ava Gardner. Jeanne Martin (Dean’s wife) was a favorite student of his. Pancho also found time to coach and teach Jimmy Connors and Stan Smith, two great tennis champions, as well as his son, Spencer Segura, who played at UCLA. In 1971, he left Beverly Hills to become the teaching professional at the La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, California, where he is now retired. He is widely credited with coaching, mentoring, and structuring the playing game of Jimmy Connors, starting at age 16, in 1968, when his mother, Gloria, brought him to Pancho in California.

But meanwhile back at the health spa…

After they took our height and weight stats, the creepy, SMERSH-like dietitians immediately put us both on a strict diet of gruel and air for the week.  (A thimbleful of chicken bouillon would be a special treat- if we made our daily goal weight.)

And once again, I had to navigate a very public locker room.

OMG!  I had never seen so many naked, wrinkled old ladies’ bodies in any one place in my life.  The clientele looked like a tanned version of this.

Euwww.  I had seen the future and it was shriveled.

And they kept taking away my towel.

As I would go from one treatment to another the Helgas and Olgas and Ingas would grab it off of me.

“Nein.  Verboten!  You must not take a towel into the virlpool bath,” one would hiss.  “It vill stop up the virl.”

I would gaze longingly toward the locker where my dark green one piece bathing suit hung.

(Yes, I looked exactly like this.)

Finally starvation- and the fear of going blind from too much exposure to over-eighty year old pulchritude- made me desperate.

“I’m breaking out of this joint, see?” I told my spouse.  “I’m sorry you’re having such a great time with the tennis and all but I can’t take it any more.”

He looked at me.

“No, screw it.  I’m hungry.  We’re out of here.”

We left so fast that my green bathing suit was still hanging in the La Costa locker room.

They can keep it.