There was a certain period of time β one of shyness and uncertainty, my body strung like a banjo β when a massage therapist could touch me only with a court order. Thankfully, those days are almost over, for the other day I found myself in Thousand Oaks getting a golf ball massage. Which is something a woman has never said to me, even in the occasional fantasy sequence.
But Karr can. She puts her fingers on just about anything. Most famously, Karr does golf ball massages, not a new therapy exactly, but new enough. This bod, this Botticellian work of art, reacts to the touch of others as sort of a human whoopee cushion. Prod me in certain ways β any way β and I will emit the same joyous effects usually heard only on Saturday morning cartoons.
Next thing I know, Karr is strumming my calf muscles with this golf ball, bonga-bonga-bonga. If Tiger had one of these, he might still be hitched. Anyway, the treatment feels much like a regular deep-tissue massage, only the golf ball helps Karr attack those places on the body where muscles have knotted. When she hits me in one of these trigger points β FORE! I begin to hallucinate.
A former graphic designer, Karr turned to massage therapy about four years ago. She soon discovered that the deep-tissue massages she liked to perform were tough on her thumbs, which she uses to pry those trigger points loose. But they were rough on her hands, so she developed small clay molds to cradle the ball.
Therapists who do a lot of deep-tissue work have about a five-year career span, Karr says. The cradle β or Kaddy, as she calls the device β disperses the pressure on the hand while allowing the ball to roll. A lot of therapists have started doing golf ball massage because they can bring more men into the spa, she says. Among the places offering it is the Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, where spa director Liza Esayian introduced the massage this week.
