Pamela Madsen - Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure...and Somehow Got Home in Time To Cook Dinner

Early in my odyssey to Shameless, I realized my path was made easier by the standing, often-battered army of sexual theorists, practitioners, explorers, and teachers who openly and brazenly worked to demystify sexuality. Without their determination to integrate this most fundamental of human needs into daily life, I d never have had the courage or a place to start, let alone succeed. Thank you all.
You know who you are.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anas Nin

F UNNY HOW THINGS that change overnight often are years in the making. Earthquakes, for instance. Plates deep beneath the surface move, shift, bump, and grind for eons. All that subterranean action sends up warning tremors, little rumbles that are often too small to notice. Until the big one hits, the one that shatters windows, brings down buildings, and snaps bridges in two.

I am an earthquake.

The first obvious tremblers hit when I corralled my Martini Gangmy sister, my cousin on my mothers side, and my two best girlfriendsinto an authentic Korean spa for a day of tubs, scrubs, and hot-crystal meditation rooms. Id read about it in the New York Times months before. It sounded fabulous. Wrangling all of us into the same place at the same time, however, was not so fabulous. It required weeks of intense negotiations. I got less agitated bringing a nonprofit staff and a board of directors into agreement on a radical new fertility policy than I got pulling five of us together. Even for a self-made, headstrong executive director like me, nothings harder than coordinating type-A women who are overextended with work, children, and some version of a marriage. Especially when it involves them abandoning their homesteads early on a summer Sunday for exotic indulgences beyond the Manhattan city limits in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Beth was the special challenge. Her life had more moving parts than a pinball machine. I knew she had to wrestle with her volatile brood of four adolescent girls, the dog, the garden, the twenty-year marriage, and, of course, the boyfriend. She ran a small, well-curated art gallery and indiscriminately served on do-gooder committees. The two Es were her constants: Erratic schedules and Emergencies.

I maneuvered into a parking space next to Beths eco-friendly hybrid. She had arrived seconds before me and was leaning against her car, long black hair blowing in the Sahara-like wind, deep in an animated phone conversation. Two minutes later, Vickimy big sisterpulled in behind me. She had Cousin Sophia, my own personal Italian-Jewish Auntie Mame, in tow. Vicki locked up and they walked over, Sophia carrying off the billowy chiffon top that hid her lovely roundness and made her seem much younger than her sixty-plus years.

Husband or Kevin? Vicki asked, raising an artfully shaped eyebrow.

Beth snapped the cell phone shut. Her flushed cheeks were a dead giveaway. I knew that look. I knew everything about her since we were five years old and our mothers made us hold hands the first time we went ice-skating. We havent let go since. Beth put on oversized shades to hide her obviously teary brown eyes. Loverland isnt always easy.

Kevin, Vicki and I chorused softly.

Did you tell Mom what we were doing today? I asked Vicki while we waited for Beth to compose herself.

Absolutely not! Vicki was vehement.

So neither one of us checked in.... Thats going to go over really well.

I coulda been lyin dead on the floor for all anyone would know. What would it take? One phone call? Vickis Mom schtick was dead-on. She was a carbon copy of our mother, right down to the curve of her long, shapely legs.

We burst out laughing.

Just the idea of your tennis-playing, step-dancing, aquasizing eighty-year-old mother helpless anywhere is just too funny. Aunt Roz would love to be here, a day with the girls, Sophia said.

Ooh, that would have been perfect. Why didnt I think of that? I said, my conscience kicking in. Damn it. Ill call her on the way home and take the hit.

Beth waved her hand to get our attention, as if we werent standing an unobstructed five feet away. She craned her neck, scouring the crowd. Let me guess, Olivias not here yet.

We loitered in the sticky tar parking lot, pale Amazons in a sea of tiny Korean women all headed for the King Spa. Olivia was always punctually ten minutes late. Her computer went down. Her genius twin boys were one chemical compound away from a patentable cure for carbohydrate cravings. Her petulance-prone lover threatened suicide if she did not leave her husband. Dire or magnificent, the issue always took Olivia an unscheduled ten minutes to resolve. It made her even more exotic than her half-Chinese and halfEuropean Jewish one-of-a-kind beauty. She loved signing her e-mails xoxo your Chinkajew.

At precisely 10:10, she arrived. She waved a languid hello, parked, and joined us on our pilgrimage past the roasting cars to the bland seventies industrial warehouse. We squeezed in a huddle around the shoulder-high reception desk, firing way too many questions. What exactly is a face-whitening facial? Could we get five salt scrubs at the same time? And the foot reflexology, too? What do you mean these wristbands track what we spend?

For chrissakes, just pay and go in, snapped the woman behind us. I wheeled around with a ready retort, but then I saw the pileup behind us. The crowd was turning ugly.

Sorry, sorry. Really sorry, the five of us called to the surging throng, throwing credit cards at the cashier.

In return we were handed the most god-awful gym outfits ever. We went to Dressing Room 1, where we ditched our street clothes and slipped into the mandatory uni-sexless Pepto-pink spa wear required for the coed areas. The color didnt work for me, but I was thrilled to feel diminutive in the one size fits pretty much everyone on earth getup. The best partthere were no pockets. No pockets meant no cell phones. Nobodynot work, the kids, my husband, or even my mothercould reach me for hours.

A thick glass wall separated the changing area from the bathhouse, a space so beautiful and strange, it stopped us dead in our tracks. It wasnt the immaculate elegance of the glass-and-stone-tile spa that got us. It wasnt the gargantuan hot, cold, and warm tubs; frigid open showers; or the sauna and steam rooms that knocked us out. It was the vision of dozens of naked women squatting at handheld shower stations scrubbing their most intimate anatomy with abandon, washing each others backs, butts, breasts, and whatnots.

Whoa! Now, thats different, Beth muttered in my ear. Did the Times article say anything about that?

Looks great! Vicki said. My brave sister was always up for anything. Who wants to wash my pits?

We stripped down to nothing in the locker room. Vicki strutted by with her new, postcancer rebuilt breasts. There was no way I could avoid them or the mortality that hovered over my once-invincible sister. These breasts were huge, two Pamela Andersonsized mountains with riverbed scars running along their sides and bottoms.

You could clean up on the strip circuit with those, I said, batting away the powerful combination of awe and upset with a one-liner. It was shocking to see that her breasts dwarfed mine when I had always been at least one cup size bigger, the one thing I inherited from my mother that she didnt.