Fifteen years ago, when I was living in Tucson, AZ and looking for work, I decided that becoming a Mary Kay lady would be a good idea. I don’t know why I thought that, except to say that sometimes my judgement gauge is out of whack.
I seldom wear dresses, make-up, or frills. I am most comfortable in sweats and T-shirts and, of course, fat jeans.
So it is an enigma — even to me — why I ever wanted to join that club of make-up mavens.
Was it the lure of the pink Cadillac? Or maybe the obvious irony of placing myself in a fish-out-of-water situation, the joke that an adult tomboy like myself would consider selling cosmetics at all?
Whatever the reason, I opted to dip my un-manicured toes in the vast ocean of beauty. The following is the story of how I came to have one big day at Mary Kay:
I was driving along the city streets in my eleven-year-old Civic, wishing for a new car and contemplating a career path more lucrative than unemployed actress when I stopped at a Furr’s cafeteria for lunch. (I needed my vegetables.) I parked my decade-old chariot alongside a sporty foreign car the color of red lipstick. Sexy, I thought. And then I noticed the equally red window sticker – Mary Kay Cosmetics.
Faster than those four wheels could go from zero to sixty, I birthed a thought, Mary Kay equals new career, Mary Kay equals new car. It was that simple.
After my sneeze-protected buffet of wilted broccoli and warmed-over fish, I went home to my one-room apartment and dusted off the yellow pages. While I dialed, visions of steering a creamy pink Caddy danced in my head.
A new car! A new job! A new life! Now that would dissolve all my strife!
I thumbed through the M’s and landed on Mary Kay representative Betty Lynn. I dialed the number and heard the message, “Hi, this is Betty Lynn, independent director for Mary Kay Cosmetics. We are proud to be the best-selling cosmetics for five years running. Wow!” Wow indeed!
Oh, I have to do this. I left a message for Betty Lynn as I debated which Cadillac would look better sitting in the dirt parking lot of my desert apartment.
Betty Lynn returned my call immediately. Oh, yes,” she said. “It is possible to work for Mary Kay!” Her voice was more chipper live than on her Memorex.
Betty Lynn was ecstatic at the timing of my call and said, ”On Saturday we are initiating a witch into our coven.”
“What?”
“We are initiating a new sales director,” she repeated. “You must come. It’s a big to-do!”
I said I’d love to come.
Betty Lynn instructed me to wear “business dress” to the ten a.m. Saturday morning shindig. What remained of my feminine intuition told me it would also be a good idea to wear make-up. Suddenly, Mary Kay felt like the most challenging acting role ever.
Betty Lynn insisted on escorting me to the Mary Kay ball.
“I’ll pick you up,” she said. “That way we can talk. And I can knock you silly and impregnate you with Satan’s sperm.”
“What?”
“I can answer any questions you have.”
“Okay.”
I had hoped to ride to the shenanigans in a chariot of most extraordinary proportions — a pink Caddy or one of those red sporty jobs at least. What Betty Lynn pulled up in was red and sporty… thirty years ago. Sixty-year-old Betty Lynn was trying to hold onto her youth in a tiny two-seater with chipped paint and peeling vinyl. By comparison, my car looked like a Bentley.
I had to pace myself not to blurt out my main question right away, but I couldn’t hold out for long. “What do you have to do to get a car?”
Acquiring a car was a matter of numbers. “Sell five hundred children into slavery,” Betty Lynn said. “Or $500,000 worth of cosmetics.”
The children seem much easier, I thought.
Betty Lynn’s clunker sputtered to the local Marriott where the gala was to soon begin. As her handmaiden for the day, I hauled in Betty Lynn’s super-sized coffee maker and viewed the great feast of processed sugar:
Cakes were lined up on tables of two.
Cakes of chocolate, vanilla, and goo.
The Mary Kay girls were all dressed alike,
in skirts of black and blazers of white.
Regardless of weight, each shoveled in cake.
And guzzled enough coffee to fill up a lake.
Then it began, the music so loud.
Music for aerobics, piercing and proud.
You ready for this…
Donk, donk, donk, donk, donk…
Two Mary Kay gals (and aerobics teachers)
led the group like evangelist preachers.
Singing and dancing and swaying and clapping,
Personally, I felt I’d rather be napping.
But a target was I of Mary Kay’s church
a likely suspect to hang by a birch.
Or a convert to save if I’d only behave
like a woman for once… or at least shave.
And then came the song
for which I had longed…
The anthem of Mary
the carol of Kay:
Pink Cadillac
Crushed velvet seats
Riding in the back, oozing down the street
Waving to the girls, feeling out of sight
Spending all my money on a Saturday night
Honey, I just wonder what you do there in the back
Of your pink Cadillac, pink Cadillac…
The aerobics were fast
the cake eating furious
and all but me
thought it very luxurious.
Then the voice of Gloria Estefan
beamed through the stereo.
Was she one of them?
A Mary Kay impresario?
If I could reach
Just for one moment touch the sky
For that one moment in my life
I’m gonna be stronger
Know that I’ve tried my very best
I’d put my spirit to the test
If I could reach…
Before I could blink,
the girls got down to it.
Spouting their rhetoric
saying, “We girls, we do it!”
“This event’s like a wedding!”
“A Mary Kay marriage!”
“Inducting a sister
we’ll never disparage!”
They blessed Mary Kay
for “creating this company”
and recited rules golden
to bring up the ante.
Then it was time
for the oath of the husband.
The sister’s mister,
her very own trust fund.
Celine Dion sang
and he concurred.
“Wife is everything
because he loved her.”
Then it was time
for Wife herself
to testify
as a Mary Kay elf.
“This is a gift,” she said,
“to work for Mary.
All you’ve got to do
is receive and be cheery.”
Then the High Steppin’ Dream Team
woke the crowd with a gong
‘cause it was time
for a high-energy song (!).
Win with Mary Kay
Red hot, hot, hot
Takin’ it to the top
Never gonna stop
Headed to the top
They auctioned off prizes
to the hopeful new tricks.
Gifts like concealer,
mascara, lipstick.
And in exchange
all that they asked of you
was to sell your soul
that’s how they masked you.
The guest speaker took
her place on the stage,
promising she once was
shy for her age.
“But now I support
my family of three
because I believed in the
dream that was me.”
“Dreams are not homes,
meals and school.
Dreams are so very much
more cool.”
“I dreamt of vacations,
limos and Caddys.
Those are the dreams
that make my kids bratty.”
“Now I live for these meetings,
your support and applause.
I feel like a star
that’s the power you cause.”
“Do not be deceived
you’re not always lovable.
One must build her troops:
a pyramid of the gullible.”
“My marriage was failing,
my husband a bore,
but now I sell make-up
while he golfs until four.”
After Guest tooted
her self-righteous horn
I was then shown
how a pyramid is born.
One woman starts
and recruits another
then the first woman’s known
as the other one’s mother.
So on and so forth
the process will go
until grandma’s got
enough daughters to sow.
And how do you become
a grandma on high?
Why just buy a kit
Buy, buy, buy, buy!
For a single hundred
(dollars not sense)
you, too, can make
a Mary Kay pence.
It’s a bargain, a cinch,
an investment, a steal
Got to spend it to make it
Hey, what a deal!
Like evangelists on high
those pink ladies sold
to all except me
who wasn’t so bold.
It was like a revival,
a cult, a religion.
It was all I could do
not to retch just a smidgen.
I slunk out of there
like a snake shedding skin
and into the hall to wait
for Ms. Betty Lynn.
Betty Lynn showed
with her coffee pot towed
and to Tomboy she asked,
“Would you help with my load?”
Once in the car, Betty Lynn said, “Wasn’t that wonderful? You must have questions galore. Tell me what did you like or love?” Or abhor.
“Well, to be honest,” said I. “I’m sick of rhyming. It’s made me quite nauseous to keep talking in timing.”
“That,” said Betty Lynn, “has nothing to do with us. That was your style of making a fuss.”
“Okay, here goes,” I said stopping the rhyme (on a dime). “My question is this… Is Mary Kay a pyramid scheme?”
Betty Lynn screeched to a stop while she bristled at me, adding emphatically, “No! We sell a product and a good one at that! We are nothing like a pyramid scheme!”
Then I noticed Betty Lynn’s skull start to glow as two fiery nubs broke through the skin on top, bubbling up her already bulbous hairdo.
“I did not sell my soul,” Betty Lynn cried. “I did not. I did not.”
That’s when I realized that besides no longer rhyming, I would not sell my soul; I would not, I would not. I would not buy a one hundred-dollar starter’s kit. I would not have a three-hour-a-week full-salaried job. I would not own a pink Cadillac.
I would not. I would not. I would not.
But I would always have my day at Mary Kay.
THE END
As Sedaris writes, “This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. ‘One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.’ The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.’”
