Color Me Hot, Hot, Hot

For the record, the color my grandmother wanted for her toenails when Tiffany and I took her and my mom for pedicures last weekend was mauve. That's the color she already had on. Because she doesn't see very well anymore, she asked me to find mauve, and, though I did my darnedest, the closest thing I could find was basically brown.

"Here," my mom said, swooping in and expertly picking a bottle from the rows and rows of colors.

Mauve, it read on the bottom.

I did not want mauve, so I reached for the display of pinks, picking one I thought looked somewhat my age and personality. When Nana saw I had a different bottle than she had, she put her mauve down on the table and said,

"I want that one too."

For the record, the color my 87-year-old grandmother and I ended up sharing was: "Some like it hot, hot, hot."

This is funny because one of the many things Nana and I have in common is that we do not look like we like it hot, hot, hot. Some other things we share: taking pride in still owning clothes we bought decades ago and a tendency to worry about things we absolutely cannot control.

Anyway, when the women at the salon took the color and led Nana and me to a pair of chairs, they were chattering away in another language. Occasionally, I caught the phrase "Some like it hot, hot, hot." I'm not sure what exactly they said after that, but I'm pretty sure it was something like: "Yeah, right."

My mom chose to go color-less and had her nails buffed. I didn't know buffing was an option, and immediately regretted my own choice.

Tiffany, on the other hand, went in bold--she wanted blue, which, apparently can be very tricky. The degree of separation between funky-sexy blue and Smurf blue is miniscule.

The blue she ended up with was bold, alright. But not quite in the way she'd hoped. The name of the color--"Over the top"--was technically true, but does little to provide a mental image.

It was only later that my mom identified the blue for what it really was. After our pedicures, the four of us took a cooler of beer and Dr Pepper down to the Golden Gate Bridge. We sat on a bench and ate hot dogs and chips. When we got up to go, I crushed the cans the way my grandfather used to.

"Oh my god, Tiffany," my mom cried, pointing at Tiffany's feet. "Your toenails are Bud Light blue!"

And they so totally were.