Time for a Fake Tan? Don't Sweat It!

My father's nickname was "Whitey." This gives you an indication of my proclivity for acquiring a natural suntan during the summer months, and helps to explain how I found myself in a closet-sized walk-in plastic booth a few weeks back wearing nothing but two cotton balls inside my nostrils and a pair of plastic eye protectors.

"Do you want to go get a 'Blast-It' tan?" inquired my daughter, who came to visit for the summer.

For those self-confident Scandinavian descendants who, like myself, never considered experimenting with other pigments, a "Blast-It" tan, which is a made-up name for the purposes of this column, is a popular spray-on tanning procedure that involves stripping down to your birthday suit then stepping inside a porta-potty-shaped chamber and holding your breath for approximately 25 minutes while being pelted with brown dye from head to toe, on both sides.

It's fun.

Well, O.K., it's actually quite horrible. But the results are fun, because you step out of the booth fully bronzed, even in places you don't need to be, and everyone compliments you on your tan for the first time in 50 years.

My daughter, who has gotten me to do things in my life that I never would have tried had I never met her, is a seasoned spray-tanner. Because she inherited my reflective pearl-white derma with a genetically built-in SPF in the upper hundreds, she pretty much has to.

"I'll go in first," she said confidently when we got to the tanning salon, after offering me a few pointers while we waited.

"Take a deep breath before you press the button. You're going to have to hold your breath for a while. Don't inhale. You'll be fine."

The disclosure that I would not be able to take in oxygen for an undetermined amount of time was almost as unsettling as finding out one that one does this sort of thing a la buck naked.

I tried to remain calm as I flipped through a magazine in the waiting area and listened intently for any possibly alarming noises emanating from the Blast-It enclosure during my daughter's tanning session. After a few moments I heard what I concluded to be the starting up of the spray blasters. I began to count the seconds that my daughter was now presumably holding her breath.

"One thousand twenty-five, one thousand twenty-six, one thousand twenty-seven..." I mentally counted.

Who did they think I was, Shelly Winters in the original Poseidon Adventure?

Finally the sprayers stopped and several minutes later out stepped my daughter, 130 shades darker.

"Your turn," she grinned, with extra white teeth.

Heart racing, I was lead into the pre-spray room by an attendant who asked if I had ever had a Blast-It tan before, and then she launched into a well-rehearsed instructional speech.

"After you come out, you will use these four towels to wipe off the excess spray. This one is for your legs. This one is for your lower body. This one is for your upper body. And this one is for your face."

Although I didn't pay that close attention because at that moment I truly believed I wasn't coming out of that contraption alive.

After she left me alone to disrobe, her instructions began to swirl around inside my head in a jumbled mess: "Step off the mat, push the button, step back on the mat, pull down your plastic eye covers, turn around, hold up your arms"...or was it "pull down your eye covers then step off the matt"? No, that wasn't it.

After what seemed like an eternity of staring at the button on the opposite wall I finally took a huge gulp of air, jumped off the rubber mat, pressed the button, and jumped back on the mat. The sprayers kicked in, starting at my feet, and slowly moved over my face and the top of my head. I turned around as I had been instructed and realized that I was only half done and was already desperately craving oxygen. I exhaled and breathed in through my cotton-stuffed nostrils. But I had stuffed them so tight with cotton that no air was able to penetrate. Suddenly I coughed and inhaled a lung-full of brown mist. A moment later the sprayers shut off and I fumbled for the door and stumbled out of the magic booth gasping for air.

After wiping dry and getting dressed I entered the waiting room to oohs and ahhs over my newly bronzed look.

Giddy with color, my daughter and I left the salon.

"Just remember, don't sweat for four hours," the owner warned us as we headed for our car which was parked in the sun on a day where the heat index reached 118 degrees in the shade.

That explains the numerous indelible brown-colored rivulet streak-marks running down the backs of both of my legs.

But luckily most people are too busy staring at my raccoon eyes to notice.