Humor

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Summer is here, and I’m really uncomfortable. It’s not the Midwest humidity or climbing temperature that’s making my skin crawl—it’s the absence of bronzed skin that’s making me want to crawl under rock and hide, like a little white mealworm.

Even in Indiana, people have good base tans going by May, thanks to tanning beds. Normally, I’m lightly tanned by this time and fully enjoying shorts and sleeveless tops. Not this year. I’ve decided to give up tanning.

Every time I look at my thighs and shudder, I rehearse all the reasons that tanning is bad. We all know the litany. And even though both my parents have had skin cancers removed, tanning is a behavior and way of thinking that is hard to break.

For me, it all started with Malibu Barbie. Then it was my beautiful teenaged cousins from southern California. Then it was everyone on TV, even the Brady’s, when they went to Hawaii. Kids of the 60s were led to believe that sun-kissed skin is healthier and more attractive than pale skin. I cannot shake the brainwashing—Nicole Kidman is beautiful, but when I see her, I secretly think, “That girl must have titanium-strength sun block. I think she needs a day at Disney World with some low-grade Coppertone slapped on.”

I’ve tried “Tan-In-a-Bottle,” and the results were astonishing—astonishingly orange, like a striped tiger cat. My palms looked like I’d eaten a truckload of carrots. And any old scars moved to the foreground like the magic invisible white writing you see on Easter eggs.

Pasty skin is the perfect backdrop for highlighting flaws. The surface of my legs reminds me of southern Indiana—gentle rolling hills with rivulets of tiny blue veins. And what’s with these bumps on my arms? They look and feel like apricot colored Swiss dot material.

So far, I’ve maintained my vow to refrain from tanning, but it’s getting harder and harder to resist. So I decided to take drastic measures—I’ve been looking at skin cancer lesions on the internet. Can I just say they’re way uglier than bumps?

And the aging thing—all I have to do is recall the uber-tanned neighbor in “Something About Mary,” and my resolve builds again.

Tanning aficionados like to debate research that points to dire consequences of sun damage. But I found an interesting new study that once and for all, for me, at least, ends the debate: tanning bed rays have been directly linked to melanomas on the shaved backs and ears of the South American opossum monodelphis domestica, or short-tailed ‘possum, if you’re from these here parts.

Put in layman’s terms, Dr. R.D. Ley of the Lovelace Medical Foundation in Albuquerque did a 70-week study with a control group of opossums and another group exposed to low dosages of the rays.

According to Dr. Ley, “The second group got the tumors, but they still looked infinitely cooler and sexier than that nerdy control group.” No, he didn’t say that. He said, “One subject in the control group, ‘Nicole,’ would not associate with the others in her group because they were just pale and pasty, but she was, in her words, ‘fair to look upon, with a delicate blush.’” No, he didn’t say that, either, but I wish he had.

Anyway, the opossums have the last word. But researchers didn’t have to put them in a lab to figure this out. When was the last time you saw a ‘possum sunbathing? The smart ones know it’s dangerous. The last time I saw one sunbathing, it was literally flat in the middle of the road, soaking up rays like there was no tomorrow, and going “into the light,” where all shades of opossum are beautiful.

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