“Oooh!” came the sound of 40 female voices, as the lights went out in a Bethesda nail salon earlier this week. A moment before, under bright lights, the customers had been jiggling pleasantly in their massage chairs as a rank of dark-haired pedicurists bent over their feet.
Now it was silent, with an occasional murmur. A single safety light flicked on overhead, and its pale light turned everyone cadaverous.
There’s a curious sort of pause that, apart from hearing (obviously), you can almost feel on such occasions. We take electricity for granted, reasonably enough, and when it suddenly disappears it seems to require an extended moment for people to process what has just happened.
Whether it’s because of the swiftness with which all the usual ambient sounds die away — the hum of air conditioners, the whir of fans, the “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” of Muzak — or because of the mild shock of an abrupt change, people immediately drop their voices.
Whispering to their clients, the women who worked in the salon began rolling stools out into the hallway, where the emergency backup lights were stronger, to finish lacquering sets of toes and fingers. The shop, which was fully booked through closing time, was forced to close several hours early.
“We’re lucky,” a manager said wryly the next day, when the lights were on again. “That’s the first time we’ve lost power here. Our other salon was closed for three days, the last time!”
So it goes in Washington, in the summer of 2010. Everyone has a power-outage story to tell.
Friends who live downtown tell of brownouts in their apartment buildings and the roasting indoor temperatures that came in consequence. People in the suburbs phone each other furiously to exchange Pepco’s latest false promises.
At Trader Joe’s, a sweaty woman maneuvered two fully loaded carts toward the cashier.
“Everything was spoiled, absolutely everything!” she was telling the person on the other end of her cell phone. “I have to restock completely.”
Somehow it seems comically fitting that on Thursday night, just as Bravo’s “real” housewives of D.C. were preparing to debut the queasily awaited show in which they will be seen preening and strutting and giving each other attitude, real housewives all over our area suddenly found themselves in the dark.
“Darn,” one such housewife said to a group of friends, as she lit tea lights and placed them around her kitchen. “I was so looking forward to an hour of unmitigated vulgarity.”
“Thank goodness for Pepco,” said a friend, in defiance of prevailing views, as she opened a bottle of wine. “Now we can all have a quiet evening in peace and quiet, instead.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
