Many years ago, I leisurely strolled into the bathroom and mindlessly began my normal shower routine. I took off the t-shirt I was wearing, carefully spread it out on the floor as a mat and stepped out of the rest of my clothes. I made sure the water was as hot as I could stand it and that the nozzle was positioned at just the right angle. Then, once I was thoroughly wet, I grabbed my trusty bar of Ivory soap and began the complicated scrubbing process.
As I think I mentioned in an earlier column, my particular shower routine demands that I attack from left to right and work without the aid of a washcloth. I leave scrubbing my hair to the very last, and then slowly turn counterclockwise to rinse off.
Well, everything was going just fine until it was time to reach for my beloved Pert Plus. Much to my surprise, it was gone. “Mary,” I cried out to my wife, who was putting the finishing touches of her makeup on in the bedroom next door, “where’s the Pert Plus?”
“Now how would I know that?” came the indifferent reply.
“The Pert Plus is gone, Mary!” I said in a panic. “Someone stole the Pert Plus!”
“No one stole the shampoo, Daryl.”
“Well, it’s certainly not in here on the ledge where it’s supposed to be.”
“The boys probably used it all up,” she said. “Look in that cabinet above the towels. I think there’s another bottle of it in there.”
“I don’t see one,” I said as I pulled back the shower curtain and swung open the cabinet door.
“Then just go ahead and use one of the shampoos Carrie and I use. They’re in the cabinet on the other side of the towels.”
“But I’ll have to get out of the shower to do that,” I said.
“Have a nice day,” suddenly said my smiling wife as she stuck her head in the bathroom, waved goodbye, and hurried out of the house on her way to work.
“Well, this is just great,” I mumbled to myself as I stepped out of my warm shower and reluctantly went in search of untested shampoo which might do God only knows what to my hair.
Having never ventured into my wife and daughter’s bathroom cabinet before, I was shocked at what I found. As I stood there dripping wet, I didn’t even know where to begin. The thing was overflowing with thirty or forty or fifty different kinds of bottles, some plastic, and some glass, and they came in all different sizes, shapes and colors. None of them looked like the friendly little green container my Pert Plus comes in, so I began reading labels. The one word which seemed to pop up in most often was `moisturizer’, and here is just a small sample of what I found: Vaseline Intensive Care lotion for smooth legs and feet; Avon Skin-So-Soft bath oil spray; Sally Hansen’s Hair Removal Wax Strip Kit for face, eyebrows, and bikini line; PCT daily conditioning and moisturizing gel for lips; Matrix Essentials nutrient-rich conditioner; some kind of bubble bath with advanced moisturizers; Abba pure and natural hair care; Vanilla body splash; Back to Basics mint leaf daily conditioner; Oil of Olay moisturizing body wash; Freeman’s apricot facial scrub; Neutrogena oil-free acne wash; Alberto VO5 styling gel; Skintimate shave gel for women; Beautiful Bath, an energizing sea soak bath treatment with deep cleansing moisturizers; and some kind of maximum strength anti-itch ointment.
I finally came across a bottle of something called Rusk, which claimed to be `a gentle cleansing shampoo’. It seemed to be the only thing that had the word shampoo on it, so I decided to give it a try, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it to lather up. I rinsed it out as best I could, toweled off, put my clothes on and was trying to comb my poor limp hair when my daughter knocked on the door and reminded me it was her turn to use the bathroom.
“What’s wrong with you people, anyway?” I asked her as we traded places.
“What?” she asked.
“I just went through all that garbage you and your mother use on your hair and skin. There must be a couple of hundred dollars worth of it in there. Do all women have a moisture problem?”
“What are you talking about?” asked my daughter.
“There’s got to be fifty bottles of junk in your bathroom cabinet claiming they can put moisturizer back in some part of a woman’s body. Now just what is that all about? Do you realize I’ve never once in my entire life walked up to a woman and thought maybe she wasn’t moist enough?”
“Dad,” said my daughter as she shook her head and pushed me out of the bathroom, “as usual, I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about, but, hey, I do like the way your hair looks today.”