"Your Soaking In It!"

It was a moment right out of that old Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid commercial, the one where Madge, the wisecracking manicurist, shocks a customer by telling her that her hands are soaking not in beauty salon lotion, but a dishwashing product.

Flanked by Amy and Nicole, with whom I had just spent a grimy week rebuilding Katrina homes in New Orleans, I am sitting in an express nail salon at Dulles International Airport, on a short lay-over on the return to Boston. A newbie to the world of mani-pedis, on a whim I had decided to join them as they sought some cosmetic first aid for hands more attuned to the rigors of texting and typing than ripping out ceiling tiles, pounding nails, and painting trim. “I’m new at this”, I told them, as the manicurist worked on softening my cuticles (what is a cuticle, anyway?), “but I think we are supposed to talk about whether Jen is over Brad yet and if his thing with Angelina is really going to last….”

Well next thing you know, Irina, who is applying some sort of disk-sander to Amy’s soles, asks where we were and what we were doing, and when she finds out that we were on a church mission trip, starts in telling us about how much she loves the Russian Orthodox church she belongs to. Then Abril, busy applying a vermillion shade to Nicole’s fingernails, starts in about what a great Hispanic Pentecostal church she attends, and how she doesn’t know how she would get through a day without her faith.  At which point Marcy starts chiming in about the evangelical church she calls home.

It was a “Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore” moment for us three New Englanders, where the odds of anyone talking about their faith in public are about as long as a summer Friday back-up trying to get over the Sagamore Bridge.  Funny thing is – I went in looking to get my hands worked on, I came out renewed in soul.