Not meant for internal use

Dominican Republic…I know it’s not THE south, but it’s south nonetheless. It was the end of vacation and my husband and I were staying at this casino in the capital. The old man had won some money gambling and he decided that he’d pay for a spa treatment for me (I’m a sucker for those things!). I opted for an exfoliation treatment since I was a little scaly from the sun. I walked into the spa and the woman who greeted me asked me to change out of my clothes and into a robe.

I should’ve known that something just wasn’t right when I walked into the treatment room and it reminded me of an operating room. It was solid white, circular, and had a white ceramic table in the center. Conzulea (the lady who would be working on me) didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak Spanish…very well…okay, at all. She motioned for me to remove my robe. She was holding a towel, so I assumed that she was going to lay them across me while on the table, so I could maintain some sense of dignity. Nope. I ended up 100% naked on the table. I started giggling a little bit and perhaps that’s when she misinterpreted my nervous laughter for sheer bliss.

The procedure started out as normal…salt scrub on my feet working on up the legs…knowing she was going to stop before she hit, well, you know. She didn’t. And this wasn’t just a surface scrubbing, mind you, it was all of me! Oh yeah, Connie baby was going to make sure that I left with a glide in my stride. She even dug an ingrown hair out of my bikini line with her fingernail. While this was going on, I was trying to figure out the word for “stop.” Nothing came to me. Well, words did: “pencil,” “aunt,” “window.” The important things that they teach you in Spanish class. Two more thoughts entered my head: 1. I was being punked and at any moment someone was going to race in to let me in on the joke or 2. this was being aired on the hotel’s pay-per-view adult pleasures channel. So I did what any other kind tourist would have done: I stayed put and started laughing. I laughed because that’s all I could do and because I knew that people would not believe that this happened to me.

She finally got me all covered with sea salts and it was time to rinse that off on go on to treatment #2. Imagine my expression when she yanked a long, green garden hose out and hosed me off with it! And yes, EVERYTHING was rinsed. She finally felt I was salt-free enough to flip over and the whole process started again. I believe the highlight this time was when she took a loofah (guys, if you don’t know what it is, please ask a female nearby. I’ll wait.), spread my cheeks apart and worked a loofah like it’s never been worked before. Repeat steps using other scrubs for an hour and a half!

I was rubbed down with crushed walnut shells and lotions, but my favorite had to be the oatmeal. Oh yeah, I could just imagine that Quaker Oats man thinking to himself with that smug smirk on his face, “Now that’s what I intended this stuff to be used for! Breakfast smeakness!” Near the end of my treatment, Connie decided to wash and condition my hair (which she did) and I was instructed to shower and get dressed. It took me a few minutes to figure out what had just happened to me. Was I actually probed by food products by a lady whom I’d just met? Yup. I walked to the desk, paid, and went back to my room.

My husband walked in a few minutes later to find me sitting on the bed just staring into space.

“How was the treatment?” he inquired.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I muttered.

“No, really. How was it?” He was not going to let it go, so I recounted the entire sordid story to him. His jaw just kept dropping lower and lower. “Well did you give her a tip?”

“I thought I needed to buy her dinner,” I whined.”She saw and touched parts of me that even I hadn’t!”

When I think back on it now, I could’ve said no. I mean, that’s pretty international, right? I could’ve shook my head. Everyone knows that means no. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I froze. Stage fright perhaps? I swear, to this day, I cannot even look at oatmeal the same way.