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What’s red and white and black all over?
(by Tracy Beckerman - August 13, 2008)
As everyone knows, Kermit the Frog, like most frogs, is a lovely shade of green. His friend Elmo is fire-engine red, and their pal the Cookie Monster is a brilliant blue. Yes, they are three different colors.
I got them beat.
In one day, I was three different colors, all by myself.
I started out the same color I usually am; white. OK, technically I am more of a peachy hue, but for arguments sake, we’ll say I was white.
I don’t normally think much about my skin color, except in the summer, when I am likely to become Muppet-red if I spend too much time in the sun.
Since I was planning on spending the day outside, I smartly applied lots of suntan lotion, and then I headed for the pool.
This is when I learned two important things:
Those little dates on the bottom of the suntan lotion actually mean something.
There is actually a reason you should wash something before you wear it the first time. (More on this later.)
After only an hour outside, I noticed that I was indeed starting to look like Elmo. This didn’t make sense to me because I had slathered on sunscreen with an spf of 50. But when I looked at the tube to see if I had mistakenly put on 15 instead of 50, I noticed that my sunscreen had expired sometime around when disco was king.
I knew that medicine expired, milk certainly expired, and my skinny jeans were also out of date. But who knew that sunscreen had a shelf life?
Clearly, not me, because every other lotion in my house also dated back to the Neolithic era.
Utterly sunscreen-less, I decided to just throw on a cover-up and go back outside.
Now here’s the part about why it is important to wash things before you wear them.
After my lovely day outside, I had plans to meet my husband for a dinner out. I went into the bathroom to take a shower, but as I stepped into the tub, I caught my reflection in the mirror and gasped.
Where my bathing suit had been, I was white. Where my cover-up did not cover me up, I was red. And where my cover-up did cover me, I was neither red nor white. I was black. Jet black.
Apparently my brand new, never-been-washed, jet black cover-up reacted to the expired sunscreen all over my body and clung to it like mold on a bathmat. I was dark as the night… from my wrists to my neck and down to mid thigh. If I hadn’t just disrobed, I would have been sure I was still dressed. Except for the naked part.
“I can’t meet you for dinner,” I told my husband over the phone. “I am multi-colored.”
“Excuse me?” he said.
I told him my strange saga and he laughed. “I’m sure it’s not that bad, honey. Go take a shower and I bet it will come right off.”
So I did. But it didn’t. I scrubbed until my skin hurt and went from black to dark gray but certainly not white, or even beige, ecru or eggshell.
When I showed up at the restaurant, my husband looked me over. “You don’t look so bad,” he said. “Kind of like a sunburned penguin.”
I glared at him and grabbed the menu.
Soon, the waiter approached. “Would you like to start with an appetizer?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have the tri-color salad.”
Tracy Beckerman’s book “Rebel without a Minivan” is available at www.rebelwithoutaminivan.com and Amazon.
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