The dollar goes a long way in Mexico, and I’m generous when I visit there, but not bossy, and that has made for some interesting experiences.
Sometimes I visit women I knew as children when I used to stay in their village and teach at their school. A couple of them call me Mama, because I looked out for them in various ways as well.
So it was that recently I went to get fake eyelashes with Sofia, my most special of all those former little girls. We were getting fancied up for the quinceañera – 15th birthday party – of her daughter.
“I’ll pay for all of our hair and makeup!” I announced magnanimously. (It ended up costing $65 for four of us.)
We would get a head start the day before the party by getting fake eyelashes put on. I was excited. I had been enchanted by individually applied fake eyelashes ever since I saw a popular lady volunteering at the Hooker Warehouse furniture sale with them. She looked fabulous. It was one of those things I’d never spend the time nor money on during my regular life, but everything is affordable in Mexico!
Sofia found a salon running a special. It was 90 degrees the day we walked there. As people do, we used an umbrella for shade and waved a little folding fan at our faces for a breeze. The 2-mile walk over dusty cement roads past cement buildings included under frighteningly crackly power lines and through a large hole in a cement wall around a factory.
Folks in Mexico are entrepreneurial, and every neighborhood is scattered with home businesses. This salon was in the living room of a lady who also sold clothes strung on lines on her front patio.
I went first. The lady started applying fake eyelashes, but I halted her: “I already have mascara on. Shouldn’t that be cleaned off first?” She agreed, and did so.
Then she struggled to get enough real eyelashes to glue the fake eyelashes to. “Señora,” she said, but in Spanish: “It is difficult to stick eyelashes on you because you don’t have much eyelash to stick them on.” I told her to just do the best she could.
If the makeup lady was going to use this picture in her promotional materials, shouldn’t she have at least cleaned the face and touched up the markup first?
Every now and then she’d also turn to Sofia as if I weren’t there: “Señora, it is very difficult to get eyelashes on your mamá because she doesn’t have much eyelashes to stick them to. I have to glue clumps on her instead of individual lashes.”
Ah geez, I was getting tired of this, but still joked to Sofia: “Just like I told you: When you’re at my age you gain some” (patting belly) “and you lose some” (pointing to eyelashes).
When the makeup lady finished, she pulled out the camera and took close-up pictures from various angles. There’s nothing private in social media days, but I’d be safe because no one knew me there.
Sofia went next, and then our teenager. Sofia’s cousin Estela already was sporting a spectacular set of lashes so she didn’t need any.
“When I first moved to Monterrey from the village, I was amazed by all the ladies’ lashes,” Estela said. “I thought they were a different race of women until I realized you got them at a salon, and I have been using them ever since.”
My eyelashes did not taper off toward the center as they should. They were just huge heavy clunks that I joked looked like dead spiders and felt heavy. They also were coming a loose little by little. By the time of the party the next day, I already had removed some of them.
At the end of the party I removed the rest of the supposedly month-long lashes.
However, they will live on in infamy on the makeup lady’s social media pages. After all, mine were the only blue eyes she ever had worked on, and as the photo shows, she was proud of – wrinkled and old makeup smudged notwithstanding.
