Going for the Spray Tan

I decided to go for it. I called Sun Your Buns to set up an appointment.

      " I'm a spray tan virgin. Is there anything I need to do to prepare?"

      "Take a shower before coming and exfoliate your skin."

I start every morning with an SAT question of the day e-mailed to me. I thought my vocabulary was pretty darn good. But exfoliate? What the heck does that mean? I didn't want to sound stupid, and thought I might be able to figure it out if she used it in a sentence.

      "So, you say I have to exfoliate my skin, right?"

      "Right. Any other questions?"

That didn't help. Better be direct. 

      "Exactly how do you exfoliate your skin?"

For those of you who didn't know, exfoliating is basically scrubbing dead cells off your skin. So I exfoliated my skin.

It made me look even whiter. Not off to a good start.

I talked my co-stripper Tiffany into going with me to the tanning place for moral support. We walked in and I told the girl at the counter (let's call her "Suzie") that I wanted to look like Tiffany. She informed me that they do spray tans, not plastic surgery.

Very funny.

When I explained to her that we were playing strippers in Gypsy and I wanted shed my Boo Radley look, Suzie was so excited that she upgraded me from a Mystic Tan to a spray tan. To use a car wash metaphor, instead of driving though the tanning spray, I would have my body detailed.

I was given the choice of wearing no clothes or a disposable bra and panties. Let's just say that getting my body detailed would require Suzie looking at my body's details, so I opted for the disposable bra and panties.

There have been times in my life when I felt I'd lost my dignity, most of which involved various medical procedures (e.g. giving birth, having a mammogram, etc.) Well, when I left the dressing room in my paper bra and Tarzan-like thong on my lily white skin, wearing a plastic shower cap on my head I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. And my dignity sunk to an all-time low.

Tiffany tried to talk me into taking a picture for the blog, but I decided to protect my readers. Here's the g-rated version:

And then Suzie turned on the fire hose of tanning fluid and I turned in a slow circle, not unlike a rotisserie chicken at Food Lion. After several minutes of spray I was ready for the dry cycle. She handed me a leaf blower and before you know it my spray tan extravaganza was over.

When I walked out of the spray tan booth I looked exactly like Tiffany. Well, not really. But my skin was the same color.

And when I walked on stage last night I thought I heard a comment from the orchestra pit:

"So where'd they get that hot under-study for the albino stripper?"