HAPPY NAILS, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Happy Halloween Nails
It was just a fluke of timing that my orange tips
coincided with the Illinois Game (colors orange & navy).
I seem to remember this same thing happening once before.
Ben & Sam said, "Mom! Not orange!"
Well, no harm, no foul -- we won both times!
2011
Pumpkin Spice
Purdue Snazzy
For a literary blogger, a large part of the fun of having your nails done is the poetic quality of the polish names. Puns abound, and the word - play provides endless entertainment. Kind of like strolling through the library, reading title after title of a hundred books that I will never have time to read, I can easily stand at the polish display for an hour, turning over each bottle to read
the clever names.
There are the food names:
Beets Me!, Bitter Chocolate, Chocolate Shake Speare, Malaga Wine, Mimosas for Mr and Mrs (suggested for weddings), and Suzi Sells Sushi by the Seashore. There are those which immediately conjure a specific color:
Teal the Cows Come Home, Turquoise and Caicos, Down to My Last Penny, Hollywood Blonde, My Chihuahua Bites (ouch!). My favorites are the concept names, where you must use your imagination to figure out what connection might exist between the name and the color:
Amster-Damsel in Distress, Can’t Find My Czechbook, I'm not Really a Waitress, Nomad's Dream, Not Like the Movies, Optimistic, Road Trip, & Mrs. Always Right.
My friend Katy has an idea for a novel in which each chapter is named after a polish color. So imagine how delighted we were to discover a novelist --
Gabrielle Zevin -- who shares our interest in these color names and has actually used them to advance the plot of her novel
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. Starting with the very first sentence of the book: "
On the ferry from Hyannis to Alice Island, Amelia Loman paints her nails yellow and, white waiting for them to dry, skims her . . . notes." Later in the novel, Amelia explains to young Maya:
Amelia takes Maya to the drugstore and lets her choose any polish color she likes. "How do you pick?" Maya says.
"Sometimes I ask myself how I'm feeling," Amelia says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'd like to be feeling."
Maya studies the rows of glass bottles. She selects a red then puts it back. She takes iridescent silver off the shelf.
"Ooh, pretty. Here's the best part. Each color has a name," Amelia tells her. "Turn the bottle over."
Maya does. "It's a title like a book! Pearly Riser," she reads. What's your's called?"
Amy has selected a a pale blue. "Keeping Things Light."
It is not lost on Maya's dad, A. J., despite Amelia's protestations, that perhaps her ever - changing nail colors reveal a hidden clue to the status of their tentative romance. Later in the day, he asks,
"What color are you wearing today?"
"Keeping Things Light."
"Is that significant?"
"No," she says.
On previous occasions, A. J. has asked Amelia, "What hue is that?" One day the answer was "Rose - Colored Glasses," another time "Blues Traveler." As the months pass, and Amelia and A. J. decide [spoiler alert!] to marry, Maya picks the perfect wedding day present for Amelia: " . . . a bottle of orange nail polish . . . A Good Man-darin is Hard to Find."
(132 - 133, emphsis added, 156; see also previous FN & KL)
Available on amazon
Nail polish serves as an effective metaphor in poetry as well as fiction. The color names chosen by poet Anya Krugovoy Silver symbolize not only the brief life span of the manicure itself but also a foreshortened human existence, opening with a
Baby's Breath, a
First Dance, and the recklessness of youth --
Russian Roulette; closing with a
Curtain Call, accepting life's ultimate fate --
Bone (the
skeleton takes the day):
Red Never Lasts
There’s no doubt it’s the most glamorous,
the one you reach for first — its luscious gloss.
Russian Roulette, First Dance, Apéritif, Cherry Pop.
For three days, your nails are a Ferris wheel,
a field of roses, a flashing neon Open sign.
Whatever you’re wearing feels like a tight dress
and your hair tousles like Marilyn’s on the beach.
But soon, after dishwashing, typing, mopping,
the chips begin, first at the very tips and edges
where you hardly notice, then whole shards.
Eventually, the fuss is too much to maintain.
Time to settle in to the neutral tones.
Baby’s Breath, Curtain Call, Bone.
by American Poet ~ Anya Krugovoy Silver, 1968 - 2018
in her book From Nothing
On living with cancer and the
connectedness of all things in life, the poet explains:
“I have a tremendous amount of joy in my life, and my joy exists with pain. I don’t see those two things as completely separate. All of life is woven together, and separating the strands is impossible.”
Anya Krugovoy Silver
on Georgia Public Radio
One more connection comes from the futuristic novel
Player Piano, a post World War II tale of
Dawn or Doom written in 1952 by the visionary
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In his imagined dystopia, the brave new machines have all but displaced meaningful human labor. Vonnegut explores the likelihood and the qualms of a society that reveres engineering above all else. However, it seems that he misguessed when he describes the "streetcorner manicure machine" that after a few minutes of buffing leaves the user "with gleaming, red - enameled nails" (239).
As it turns out, sixty - six years later, clients still value the undivided attention of a personalized, detailed manicure or pedicure. No machine has taken the place of that yet. What Vonnegut says of the haircut likewise remains true of the manicure:
"Used to be sort of high and mighty, sort of priests, those doctors and lawyers and all, but they're beginning to look more and more like mechanics. Dentists are holding up pretty good, though. They're the exception that proves the rule, I say. And barbering -- one of the oldest professions on earth, incidentally -- has held up better than all the rest. . . . It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to hisself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones, And I guess I'm just about the end of a race, standing here on my own two feet.
And I'm lucky barbering held out as long as it did -- long enough to take care of me. . . .
Anyway, I hope they keep those barber machines out of Miami Beach for another two years, and then I'll be ready to retire and the hell with them" (205 - 08).
In conclusion, I think the only thing left to say is long live the hands - on manicure and the colorful polishes with titles like books:
Back to Reality,
Envy the Adventure,
Adam Said “It’s New Year’s, Eve,”
Hello Kitty: Let's Be Friends!
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, November 28th
Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ RED: Dress, Lipstick, Fingernails & Ersatz
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com
