Inspiration Spa & Massage & Rub Emporium

While practicing our brains out in massage school, my classmates and I enjoyed designing new day spas in our notebooks and trying to frame our concept of the ultimate massage experience.

Neophytes to massage and business, we were quite earnest, quite naïve and quite unintentionally amusing.

One afternoon I very thoughtfully drew a spa layout on graph paper - trying to stuff as many rooms and amenities as possible into a fantasy 1,200 foot space. I gave it the round file treatment after I realized the corridor in my rabbit-warren spa was about 18 inches wide and I hadn’t drawn room for any toilets.

That didn’t slow me down at all, of course, given my breathy enthusiasm to bring the gift of massage to the world. The idea of a non-tacky day spa that didn’t look like a back room of a salon rolled in my head. But what to call it?

Massage names, of course, set the tone for the whole experience. Like Exhale, a name I thought I had coined until I found out it was already in use at a spa in New York. No, Inhale was much worse. What about Gasp?

I also felt inventive ownership to Massage Masters, until I realized it suggested several things that I did not want to suggest. Massage Misses was even funnier. So too Massage Mixer. Oasis seemed to be used by at least one business in every town, and way too many bars here and there.

Then I got on the task of something that begins with “A” to get first in the phonebook, a concern that seems quite retro today. Abba Spa seemed quite Swedish, but perhaps litigious. Abbott Massage too close to the temp service. Then up popped Aardvark Spa; now who would go to a place named Aardvark Spa? Biologists?

Brainstorming works best with more than one stormy brain, of course, so during my practice session at school that day I engaged one of my classmates in the name contest. If you were going to open your own spa and could name it whatever you want, what would it be?

I rolled out some of my attempts at naming a spa with unintentional double meanings. I admitted to liking Urban Spa, but it would be too low in the phone book to do much good.

My classmate thought for a while.

“I’ve got it,” she announced proudly. “Massage Muffs!”