h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I had my parents hands waxed over the weekend.

Seriously though, there's this fad going around Peking? Beijing - creating wax models of people's hands. The fad just hit our shores; I'm not sure if it's reached the Western world. I was walking around the mall a couple of weeks ago when we stumbled upon this booth selling these wax figurines of hands. Out of curiosity, I approached the booth and asked about the thing. The chirpy guy manning the booth showed me how it was done with my finger - by first dipping my finger into a tub of ice water, and then into a vat of hot wax, then dipping it into the ice water again to solidify the thin layer of wax, and then applying another layer, and another. When the layer was thick enough, the 'shell' could be slipped off with a bit of wiggling. And voila! You have the wax model of... er, my finger.

Anyway, I had the bright idea of getting a wax model of my hand done, and sending it to my dad for Fathers' Day; however, somewhere along the line, the devil in me got the better of the saint, and I found myself thinking how cool - and hilarious! - it would be to drag my parents to the place when they came over on vacation, and have a model done of their hands. Seeing as I'd missed their wedding anniversary back in May and all.

To cut a long story short, my parents came over last week, and I made sure that that mall was on our list of 'places to go'. Told them I wanted to get them a wedding anniversary present, but that it would require their FULL CO-OPERATION, and no, I couldn't tell them beforehand (and certainly not before extracting a promise from them that they'd be sporting!!!) what it would all be about. After something like five minutes of wheedling, cajoling and emotional blackmail, my parents hesitantly acquiesced -- all the while convinced that I was going to subject them to some horrendous form of public humiliation.

Imagine the look on their faces when I dragged them to the booth and declared, with an insanely perverse grin on my face, that they were going to spend the next ten minutes holding hands and have them waxed together!!!

Well... it took more than that, really. It took them something like five minutes to decide on the positioning of their hands, and two more for the booth guy to position the hands properly. The first cast went badly; dad moved, thus breaking the wax layer. By then they'd attracted a rather large crowd of very curious, very interested shoppers, and were on their way from being merely pink to turning bright beet red in embarrassment. It probably didn't help that by that time, I was laughing hysterically at the sidelines. If dirty looks were laser beams...

Thankfully for them, the second cast went well, and they were finally separated after having been forced to hold hands for the last fifteen minutes or so. I decided to have the thing filled with wax so that it would be more durable, and to have it mounted. My parents were rather delighted with the end result (and are probably going to display it proudly in the living room).... but something tells me that they're not likely to trust me with unconditional promises again anytime soon!

Obviously I can't post the picture here, but here's a link to my page: http://www.geocities.com/farlander_central/photos_strange.htm

It wasn't a really terrible thing to inflict on them but laughing hysterically probably didn't help.

It's not as odd a thing as you might think. There's a booth at the Texas Renaissance Festival every year that does wax hand casts.

And what a nice anniversary .

Well except for that hysterical laughter of course.

Well, I have an incredibly perverse sense of humour, you know And everybody in the family knows that so long as I'm around, celebrations and life in general will never be NORMAL. (most of the time it involves the massive embarrassment of somebody or the other, though)

Anyway, heck, we brought that guy a great deal of business - you should've seen the people who stepped up to have wax models done of *their* hands after we were finished!