windygirl

When the warm weather comes around here in Chicago (aka the Arctic Circle), the only thing that I, a normally intelligent multiple-degree-holding female with a solid professional life really wants to do is: get a good dark TAN!  Yes it’s true.  I am just that shallow.  So I’m off to the tanning bed of course where a wall of gorgeous $50 a bottle “indoor tanning lotions” make their siren calls to my pale and wintry ears - just being near a wall of them makes me feel somehow suddenly naughty, sexy, and glamourous, like a young Xtina or a pre-pills Britney.  They are named things like this: Worship Me, X, Barely Legal, Melt, and my favorite the Bikini-tini, which comes in a variety of cocktail flavors and claims to reduce your cellulite as well!  They make your newly bronzed skin smell like a frosty tropical drink melting under the heat of a Miami sun.  And who the hell doesn’t like that?

 I purchase a bottle of one of these magic elixiers called something like Beach Bum Rum, swoosh it all over me, scrub down my tanning bed which we all know if you don’t you’ll get a nasty case of genital warts, and with fans blasting away I jump into the giant blue electric test tube, pull the top down onto me, and wait.  All I hear is mechanical whirring.  Not unlike the sound of an MRI machine going off.  This is an unsettling comparison.  I try not to think about genital warts, skin cancer, and the irreversible aging process which I am rushing along right now in this “6 minute bed”. 

 I try to imagine a warm beach.  That smells like sea salt crusted breezes, palm trees, and pina coladas.  And my gorgeously tan bod in a bikini.  Yes that will keep my going alright!  Suddenly it sounds like your apartment after it loses power.  The magic blue capsule of pulsing electric has stopped. 

 I open the casket like top of the bed.  Am I redder? Tanner? Burned?!? God Forbid.  Ripping my winkies off, I rush to the mirror to see my golden glorious designer skin.  I pull away the top of my bikini to see: pretty much the exact same pasty color I went in with!  What a disappointment.

Why is it always like this?  Well then again what do you expect from a bottle that promises to make you feel like a sexy bouncy 19 year old with a perfect tan?  Was it too much to hope that 6 minutes in an electric bed could recreate me?  Hell no!  

Just wait until NEXT week….!

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