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First Person: My First Pedicure

Should a real man ever get a pedicure? I went to Spa Pangéa to find out and wound up insulting Michael Scott.
By Tim Rogers |

Spas are promoting new ways for males to bond. Some work, and some don’t.

THE NIGHT I GOT A PEDICURE WITH TV’s Michael Scott
started out innocently enough. We were invited by the good people at
Spa Pangéa in Arlington to take part in their inaugural Men’s Night—the
idea being that more men are going to spas these days and so why not
have two nights a month when only male clients are allowed into the spa
so that they can feel more at ease strolling around in a robe, with
their skinny, pale legs exposed? At least in my case. Michael Scott is
neither skinny nor pale.

Scott, for those in search of a mental image, is the
morning news anchor on KXAS-TV Channel 5. Still can’t picture him? He’s
the guy who, earlier this year, on live television, had a gecko jump on
his pants, causing him to flail his arms like he was on fire, shriek a
naughty word, and fall over, backward, off camera. Right—that guy.

It turns out Scott has pretty much had enough of the
gecko jokes. I mean, Jay Leno did do almost an entire show on the
incident, replaying the tape over and over again. So when I met Scott
and a few other media types at Spa Pangéa, and when I told him what a
fan I was of his work with the gecko, right away I made a friend.

Actually, he’s a swell guy with a good sense of
humor (and a gift for using salty language). He didn’t mind talking
about the attack and how he had to go to the hospital afterward because
he’d hurt his wrist when he fell down. No, the truly egregious insult
did not occur until later, after we’d changed into our plush blue robes
and gotten our facials and moved on to pedicures. And did I mention
that Men’s Night includes complimentary beer and wine?

We were sitting on a luxurious, elevated bench in
the pedicure room—four of us, men, getting pedicures, feeling pretty.
Scott was sitting to my right. At that point, we’d all been there a few
hours, and Scott had switched to water, seeing as how he had to get up
at 2:30 a.m. to do the news. He pulled his feet out of the suds-filled
foot soaker. I couldn’t help but notice a podiatric anomaly. Namely, he
had only eight toes. He would probably take exception to that
assessment. But trust me: both his feet lacked a fifth phalanx, more
commonly known as “the little piggy who went wee, wee, wee all the way
home.”

Even when I’m completely in control of my faculties
and my tongue hasn’t been loosened by Merlot and a delightful
deep-tissue massage, I sometimes say things I shouldn’t. But upon
seeing Scott’s enormous, four-toed feet, I blurted out, “Dude, you
don’t have any pinky toes!”

The effect of my observation on the mood in the room
was immediate and not necessarily in keeping with the spa’s stated
mission to rejuvenate, replenish, cleanse, and soothe. Because the
pedicurists, clearly, had noticed Scott’s eight toes. They were able to
keep their amazement to themselves only as a result of their rigorous
spa training.

A few tense moments passed. Scott said, “Yeah, well,
I had to have the bones surgically removed from my little toes because
of some really bad corns.”

One of the other guys, an editor from a glossy city magazine, said to me, “Don’t you feel stupid now?”

“Me?” I said. “I’m not the one with eight toes.”

I thought that line would get a laugh out of Scott. I was wrong. One of the pedicurists looked like she might cry.

Then the editor saved me. “Look,” he said, leaning
forward so he could address Scott directly. “Maybe if more people knew
about the eight toes thing, they wouldn’t give you such a hard time
about the gecko.”

If he’d had a week, he couldn’t have come up with a
better line. Pure brilliance and delivered with such perfect timing
that the pedicurists and Scott, podiatric freak though he was, had to
laugh. And laugh he did. A big, baritonal, anchorman laugh that said, I
might have deformed feet. But you, Tim Rogers, are ugly. And tomorrow
morning, I’ll be wearing shoes.

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