Beer and Ecstasy

SO: the biggest benefit of my husband’s participation in the weekly contest So You Think You Can Drag at The Midnight Shift is the fact that he keeps winning gift vouchers for spray tans and handing them off to me. (It sure as shit isn’t the weekly hangover I have on Wednesdays. Christ, I drink a lot at that party.) Spray tanning is not frowned upon at the Madison offices, and because I’ve always had really weird issues with my skin tone—I think I’m too pale, always, which is really just an outgrowth of my embarrassment over my always-pale, hairless thighs—I gladly join in the roundelay by trying to get one every few weeks.

I got one today at noon. The woman who sprayed me asked if I wanted it to look ‘natural’ or ‘super brown.’ What the fuck, I thought, let’s go super brown!

Four hours later, I now appear to be a close relative of Sambo. All the girls in the office keep laughing at me, ‘but in a good way!’ they insist. Our editor, a spray-tan addict who keeps a loose-fitting smock on the back door of her office for those afternoons when she has one, is whimpering about wanting to go get one. NOW. And she also scolded me for wearing too-tight jeans and sitting at my desk like a fool in an effort to avoid rubbing too much of the body paint onto their insides. “You need to change into trackies!”

So, here I am, typin’ at you from the office, chompin’ on an apple, drinkin’ a Diet Coke. I’m wearing a t-shirt, track pants, and socks with holes in them. I reek of spray tan. And I’m the color of a Skor bar. If I don’t epitomize glamour circa 2010, then what hope does glamour have?