Pedi in the Nude

Over the weekend my mother and I traveled to Lake Geneva, WI, one of my favorite places. It's full of memories for me—for the majority of my childhood, my grandparents owned a villa up there where we'd spend many weekends with my cousins and shop at the Sentry and watch Judy Garland movies and convince my little cousin that Methuselah was still alive and eat fudge and buy rings from the Treasure Cove that turned our fingers green.

The villa is gone now, but we still like to visit and on this particular visit my mother and I decided it would be fun to go classy for a change and get a pedicure. We made an appointment at this fabulous spa in The Abbey Resort, where we not only got our pedicures, but also got to use their indoor pool and hot tub. Good deal!

Since this place is so swanky, when you get there they give you a locker for your things and inside the locker is a most fabulously soft robe and some flip flops to wear as you wander about the pool and salon area. Not being the type to go to these kinds of fancy places, I did some preliminary research in the "Spa Etiquette" section of their website. (Yes they did actually have a section titled just that.) This is what the suggest re: what to wear to the spa:

We will never compromise your modesty. You will be given a robe and sandals to change into before your treatment. What you wear under your robe is up to you, our therapists will only expose the portion of your body that is being worked on.

Yes, I think they are insinuating that you may go nude under your robe. However, being the modest young lady that I am, I chose not to take that path and I wore my bathing suit AND shorts under my robe.

So as I was standing by the table of nail polishes waiting for my name to be called, there was another woman there as well, choosing her polish, maybe in her 30s. We casually chit-chatted about the polish, etc. when she came out with the truth. Our conversation went something like this:

Her: It's so hard to decide on a polish.
Me: I know, there are a lot of options.
Her: It feels really weird to have nothing on under my robe. I've never had a pedicure with nothing on!
Me: ... Ha ... Yeah
**Awkward silence while I pretended to be intensely focused on picking a polish color even though I already knew which one I wanted.

Yeah, nobody wanted to know that, lady. I didn't know what to say back. If I told her that I was normal and put clothes on under my robe, she would have felt weird so I just went along with it. Luckily for me, my pedicurist called my name soon after that.

A few minutes later, naked lady sat down just a few chairs from me for her pedicure and as I occassionally glanced in her direction, I noticed that she was a little concerned about flashing the entire room. Every so often she would look my way, probably to see how in the world I was covering myself up, but I wasn't given the fact that I was wearing shorts. She was probably horrified. She finally asked her pedicurist (is that even a word? I'm going to keep using it) for an extra towel to cover up.

Once I was finished with my pedicure I headed to the pool, making sure to completely avoid naked lady because she either A) thought I completely flashed everyone during my pedicure in a very obscene way or B) realized I did indeed have clothes on under my robe even though I led her to believe I did not. Either way, I didn't want to have another encounter with her.

Luckily I got out of there free and clear with one more fabulous Lake Geneva memory to add to my list.