Metro Pulse/Snarls/Tan Your Hide

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America's unhealthy obsession with "healthy" glows

by Scott McNutt

The sun. Center of our solar system. Bringer of life...and death.

Giver of tans.

I take the warnings about skin cancer from overexposure to the sun very seriously. But a lot of people still love and admire and desire tans. That's OK, because I believe in adults doing what they want, within constitutional limits. And they have a constitutional right to be as stupid as they wanna be. So if they want to commit slow suicide, I say, let 'em.

Me, when the summer sun shines in its most brutal months, I seek cooler, shadier climes—like, say, inside my favorite pub. There, in air-conditioned comfort, I can exercise my constitutional right to die by alcohol poisoning or second-hand smoke inhalation (except in New York). Hey, I never said the self-broilers held the franchise on stupidity.

Tans once were looked down upon as something unpleasant, that only the "lower" orders of society were forced to endure. Well into the 20th century, the "upper" classes were still obsessed with "alabaster limbs" and the similarly pasty attributes that Shakespeare and his pansy poet buddies were always going on about.

But it's a funny thing about the upper class. Ultimately, anything the other classes have, the upper one wants to preempt. It happened with the pop music scene, it happened with designer jeans, it happened with nose rings. And it's happened again, thanks to tanning machines. I guess they just can't stand that somebody else has something they don't, even if it's incongruous, inappropriate, or just plain silly. And possibly fatal.

So these days, in order to keep up with the Joneses—that is, the Boston Joneses, IV—our preppy brethren must work on their tans.

Of course, getting a tan once truly was "work," in the sense that you acquired one by spending never-ending, hot, thirsty hours laboring in the merciless sun. Now, "working on a tan" is a euphemism for lounging about, sipping cool beverages, nodding off to sleep, and allowing the sun's atomic fire to have its way with our epidermises. Which part of that routine constitutes "work?" Lifting the drink to your mouth? Licking the beads of sweat off your upper lip? Rolling over to provide the sun's deadly radiation equal opportunity with all body parts? Bah.

Thus, this is a typical exchange between upper-yuppie-über-preppies at the club:

Thad: "Hello Chad! Keeping out of trouble? Say, that tan's looking reeeeeeally dark; you've been working on it."

Chad: "Ahoy there, Thaddo, how's it going big fella? No, I rather haven't had time to work on it, just a couple sessions in the bed. I'm still having trouble with the tone on my arms, too. See how the underside is still lighter? Well, ta-ta, see you on the racquetball court."

A more realistic conversation would go like this:

Thad: "Hello Chad, how's it going, big fella? Say, that's a really dark tan there; catching any cancer yet?"

Chad: "Ahoy there, Thaddo, as a matter of fact, I've some rather nice melanomas starting on my hands; here, have a look. You know, I was smoking 62 packs of cigarettes a day, but I just didn't feel I was seeing the effects fast enough. With tanning, to be vulgar about it, 'what you see is what you get.' Well, ta-ta."

Perversely, many folks envy the upper classes their leisurely ways of dealing death to themselves and insist on getting artificial all-over tans, too. This, despite the fact that most of them could get their tans mowing the lawn and clipping hedges on the weekends. But, as too many reports have shown, as a nation, we're fat city. We have no time to mow the lawn because then we couldn't get to the tanning shop and get home in time to watch all the skinny people on Survivor V: Cannibals. Land of the free? We're Land of the Buttered-and-Baked-Couch-Potatoes.

I'm pleased to say that I'm not like that. Sure, I'm a couch potato, but I'm an unbaked couch potato. A raw potato, even. In fact, I'm one of those potatoes that has been left in the cellar so long its skin has become translucent. Or in my case, "left in the bar so long." Speaking of which: Barkeep, another round; and do you mind blowing that smoke the other way?