"You Gotta Go to Work on Myra's Feet"

Sheneneh and the Cosmic Nod of Humility

"Sheneneh!"

As I started setting up my homemade mani-pedi station, one of my favorite quotes came to mind: "You gotta go to work on Myra's feet." It comes from a classic moment in television history, specifically season two, episode seven of Martin, titled "Control." As silly as it sounds, the episode has become one of my favorite reminders that competence is rarely glamorous. In fact, most expertise remains invisible until you're forced to do the work yourself.

The episode pushes the larger-than-life character Sheneneh Jenkins to the forefront in a petty high-stakes gamble with Martin's girlfriend, Gina, who, in an effort to reclaim a lost prized possession, learns a greater lesson in earning a slice of humble pie.

It's the 90s. What would you do if you lost front-row Pistons vs. Bulls tickets? Gina assumes they went down the trash chute and goes falling down it trying to retrieve them. Gina's desperation is intercepted by Sheneneh who just so happens to have a pair of tickets to the game. Sheneneh offers a simple proposition: the tickets are Gina's if she agrees to work a shift at Sheneneh's Sho' 'Nuff Hair Salon.

Gina's ego initially refuses. She attempts some literal back alley dealings with Jerome, the neighborhood pimp, only to end up holding tickets dated 1973. With no options left other than time travel, Gina humbly enters Sheneneh's domain.

The thing is, she thinks she's going to have it easy.

More specifically, she assumes that because Sheneneh performs a caricature, the work itself must also be a caricature: easy, unserious, and beneath someone like her. Surely this wouldn't be a real business with standards, rules, or a prioritization of the customer experience. She treats it like an easy lick, assuming it doesn't actually require real skill or hard work.

But Sheneneh knows her salon and knows her customers. After all, she has spent years earning their trust. She understands that caring for people - whether through beauty, teaching, or any other craft - is never as simple as it appears from the outside.

The culture shock hits Gina immediately. Donning a hairstyle that would make Shirley Temple jealous, she's eager to escape the monotony of sweeping the floor. Gina demands a real task.

Careful what you wish for.

Sheneneh points her toward a long-time customer named Myra. Words may never hurt Gina but Myra’s feet might.

“My shoes are off!,” an exasperated Myra announces, as Gina realizes things aren't all sunny in the land of beauty.

As Gina begins to panic at the sight of Myra's feet, Sheneneh takes the reins to give Myra the pedicure she deserves. The lesson here is clear: “You got to go to work on Myra's feet!” And the electric sander goes wild (yes, an actual electric sander).

Every buff-and-scruff takes Myra to ecstasy. It's not just the relief of removing layers of callouses and corns but of the fact that she is being taken care of in a way that best meets her needs.

This is a labor of love.

As if Gina's incompetence wasn't enough to embarrass her, she temporarily qualifies herself as the one who could run the shop while Sheneneh runs errands. Now, Myra wants a perm. And like an unsupervised toddler on a mission, Gina says, "I can do it." And well... have you ever seen a toddler run a salon?

She did remember to put the neutralizer on Myra's scalp, didn't she?

Uh oh, Spaghetti-Os.

Left unsupervised, Gina's surface-level understanding of hair care completely fails her. She forgets the fundamental, non-negotiable rule of chemistry: without a neutralizer to stop the processing, a perm destroys the hair.

When Sheneneh returns, her quick thinking allows the salon workers to brace for Myra's impact and turn the situation around to convince Myra that her new balding scalp was not a failure at all. In fact, she was sure to turn heads.

While it's an absolute masterclass in comedy, the episode's title, "Control," hints at something much deeper. The true friction in that salon isn't simply between two women from different social worlds. It's between assumption and experience.

Myra's feet represent the exact moment every single discipline eventually presents us with: the gritty, unglamorous part that no one puts on an award or in a victory speech.

We live in a culture that routinely confuses clean concepts with mastered execution. It is incredibly easy to research a process, buy pristine tools, set up a beautiful workspace, and observe a task from a safe, analytical distance. From the boardroom or the armchair, everything looks like an easy lick. We may even convince ourselves that our intellectual pedigree makes us inherently above the granular labor required to solve real-world problems.

But reality always has a way of introducing us to its own version of Myra's feet. The difficult part is rarely the concept. It's the sustained proximity to another person's reality.

When we enter a space assuming that a task is beneath us, we don't just fail technically; we fail humanely. Gina's dismissal of the salon wasn't simply disrespectful toward Sheneneh; it created a destructive, subpar experience for the customer who trusted her with their care. And the other customers too. When we try to bypass the execution phase because we don't want to get our hands dirty, or do the slow, foundational work of actually learning, the output is almost always worse than we imagined.

We cannot simply intellectualize our way out of grit. Competence demands our proximity to the work. It requires us to abandon the illusion of control, put down our shortcuts, and respect the labor of the people who have been doing the work all along.

The ultimate irony of the episode delivers the sharpest kick of all. At the end of that grueling day, Sheneneh hands Gina the tickets, only for Gina to discover they were Martin's original tickets all along. They were never in the incinerator. They were just lying in the hallway where Sheneneh found them. All of the trauma, the labor, and the ruined hair were entirely unnecessary to get those tickets. But they were absolutely necessary for Gina's ego.

"Be humble. Sit down."

Sometimes the end result isn't the point. The universe has a funny way of making us work the feet just to show us what we're missing from a distance. Every discipline has its version of Myra's feet. The question left is whether we'll respect the work before the work humbles us.