Let’s Get Physical

A friend of mine who is a major Olivia Newton-John fan (“Who?” said the kids. “You know, the pretty blonde woman from that weird singing movie about the ’50s with the greasy guy your mom had a big crush on in Pulp Fiction,” said I) celebrated an undisclosed number of fabulous years on this earth yesterday, and so to honour his big girl crush, I whipped up these ONJ-centric nails inspired by the cover artwork to her 1981 pop hit, Let’s Get Physical. If you’ve never seen the accompanying video, it’s more than worth a gander. Nowhere will you find more pelvic thrusting, satin spandex pants and legwarmers (except perhaps an American Apparel store.) And come to think of it, I believe the television show Glee covered Let’s Get Physical, and Ms Newton-John herself was a guest star on at least one episode (back when I used to watch Glee, which really does not account for a particularly long period of my life; off topic, but it went south pretty quickly and I bailed hard.)

But getting back to the topic at hand, I was initially quite reticent to do these nails because real life realness – as in figure drawing or anything that’s supposed to look remotely lifelike – is absolutely not where my nail art talents lie. I’m good at coming up with fun colour combos and painting my nails to look like food and other cartoony, -oid-type things (sheep-oids, rose-oids, what-the-crap-is-that-supposed-to-be-oids), but never real. And I actually told my friend that I’d do this manicure for him so long as he didn’t mind that Olivia N-J would absolutely come out looking like a stout transvestite with elephantiasis of the chin. Which hey, she kind of does! All the same, I’m still pretty proud of the work on my thumb, which took far longer than I’m willing to disclose, because it’s the first time I ever went for the real as opposed to the cartoon, with not totally unfortunate results. 🙂