The Browner the Better

Ah, to get a tan! You don’t hear too much about teenagers today subjecting their skin to the sun’s powerful and damaging rays. But when I was in school, my summers were all about how tan I could get.

I loved the smell of Coppertone suntan lotion, but I rarely wore it. Mainly, because I was too lazy and impatient to spread lotion all over my body. (I may have been more inclined to use it if they had the sunscreen spray applicators back then, but I doubt it.) If I had worn it, it would have been to attract the sun in order to get a tan not to keep my skin all pale and healthy.

If you ask me, if, during the middle of summer, a person’s skin is the color of a shark’s underbelly, he or she does not look healthy. Certainly not as healthy as me with my sunburned cheeks giving my eyes the look of a raccoon’s. As you can see, I unfortunately have retained the same tanning biases that I had in my youth: the tanner I am, the better I look. Rest assured, however, that my husband and I are avid protectors of Meghan’s skin, applying sunblock regularly to our outdoors-loving daughter.

Every summer during high school and college, I would set up my tanning “salon” on my parents’ back patio that was, thankfully, surrounded by a six-foot wooden privacy fence. Every year I purchased a new plastic baby pool that I would position in the middle of the patio. I used the water-filled pool to cool me off as I sat in it to get my tan. Each year I added something new to my salon, after recognizing a necessary improvement from the previous year.

Problem: The hose water used to fill the pool was too cold. Solution: I started to heat kettles of water on the stove and pour them into my pool to add warmth to my pool water.

Problem: The cement under my pool was too hard on me arse. Solution: I began adding padding underneath the pool before filling it with water.

Problem: It wasn’t comfortable sitting in my pool without a back rest. Solution:  I worked on a variety of set-ups to provide back support while I was in the pool, but this problem was never resolved to my satisfaction.

Problem: Unless you’re tired, laying out is pretty boring. Solution: I added entertainment in the form of a small, orange, black-and-white television.  I plugged it in and placed it in the shade under the house’s eave, but even in the shade I could hardly see the picture. At least I had the audio so I could listen to all of the CBS soap operas I followed during college.

In retrospect, I have to admit that each year my “salon” was a bust, a failure. I spent so much time preparing to lay out, getting thirsty and going inside for a drink, getting too hot and taking a break inside the air-conditioned house, or just getting too bored while laying out, that frankly, I rarely really laid out.

During high school, my friend Sparky was more obsessed with getting a tan than I was. She used to lie on top of her parents’ RV, which was parked in her backyard. The elevation, she was sure, brought her closer to the sun’s rays, hence, a better tan in a shorter amount of time. And I’m sure the metal roof attracted the rays pretty well too. She used to blister so bad. One time, after burning her back, she had put on a shirt only to discover some hours later, that she had gotten blisters which had then popped, gluing her shirt to her body. I’m pretty sure she ended up having to go to the doctor to get her shirt removed.

When we were teenagers, every August, my friend Cindy and I were always eager to get a tan too. We’d be up at our families’ cabins on Lake Millecoquins in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and didn’t really have a place to lay out. We knew that the water would attract the sun, so we wanted to be near it. One time, we each got into our respective row boats with our folding lounge chairs, drinks and oils, and anchored our boats close together out on the lake. It seemed to be the perfect solution. Something must have gone wrong, though, because we never tried laying out this way again.

My most humiliating suntanning experience was on spring break during my senior year in high school with my friends in Daytona Beach, Florida. We were staying at the Days Inn, right on the beach. The motel’s pool had its own lifeguard.

It was our first full day in Florida and our pale skin screamed it was still wintertime. My friend Jill and I had a foil-like blanket that we were going to lay on to attract the sun. The “foil” was meant to reflect the sun onto parts of our exposed skin that rarely gets a tan – inner thighs and inner arms – without having to reposition your body every fifteen minutes. Ingenious. We only had a week to get fabulous tans and we were hopeful that this blanket would help to jettison us to our goal.

We had the blanket all spread out nicely on the sand, just outside the confines of our motel’s pool deck. We had just laid down, the backs of our heads barely touching the blanket, when our motel’s lifeguard, Wink, (Who names their kid Wink besides Mrs. Martindell?) yelled from his elevated chair. We looked up to see him pointing at us, about to blow his whistle. We sat up. What?

“Get up off that blanket right now. I don’t want to see you on it again, do you hear me?” Who is this guy, my dad? Isn’t the beach out of this guy’s pool jurisdiction? Who does he think he is, the beach police?

“Why?” Jill and I asked in unison.

“You two are way too fair skinned to be lying on a piece of foil. You probably shouldn’t even be laying out on the sand, you’re so white.” Now, just a darn minute! That was just mean.

But Jill and I went ahead and rolled up our twenty-dollar blanket and skulked back up to the motel pool, our heads lowered in shame.

Later, Wink came up to our room to see if our friend Mishka wanted to go to a party with him. (Wink had also commanded Mishka and our other pale friends to get off the beach that day.) Thank goodness she refused. He may have been a murderer!

It’s ironic that I now live in a part of California that is mostly Latino. It’s funny because the golden-brown skin of many Latinos is the exact same shade of tan that I have always aspired to have. But today, even if I went on a tropical vacation and returned with the most spectacular tan ever, around here, I’d still be considered “white.”