In Which Tanning Is Pretty Much Forever

My Phototherapist

by MOLLY YOUNG

The tanning salon was located in one of the malls alongside Highway 101, its logo a stylized pineapple and its exterior the kind described as "tasteful" in Yelp reviews. You had to be eighteen to tan legally, but this rule, judging by the girls at Tamalpais High School, was a flexible one. As with many discomfiting pastimes specific to adolescence (weed, statutory rape), tanning was technically illegal but widely permitted and often abetted by our elders. Certainly it was my favorite activity of the three.

The first time I tanned was with Alice, my best friend. We parked in the Corte Madera parking lot and located the salon easily, since it was tucked right next to the bookstore where we'd often gone with our parents to buy gifts. The change in our patronage from bookstore to salon seemed like a significant upward shift in  maturity, while the legal restrictions on tanning gave us the charge we got when buying Smirnoff with fake IDs.

The waiting area of Pacific Tan was conceptualized as a jungle and it smelled wonderful, like tanning oil. Next to issues of Cosmopolitan lay brochures touting the benefits of Vitamin D, reminding us in their nature of the health-based arguments we lobbed at our parents in favor of Fruit Roll-Ups and Gushers.

The clerk was a kind man who recommended options from the tanning menu and asked me if I was part Chinese. I no longer had frosted highlights at this time but I was still interested in resembling Carmen Electra, so I chose the maximum tan that my skin could handle; Alice was able to go a shade darker thanks to her base tan. The goal was not only a positive one (to roast ourselves) but a negative one (to make our teeth look whiter) and a holistic one (to become hot).

We learned that each private tanning room had a theme––Shangri La for one, Captain Nemo's Nautilus for another--and that a tan included complimentary refreshments and chilled water. Nothing feels more luxurious to a seventeen-year-old than free Mint Milanos still nestled in their paper cups.

Tanning is the most counter-intuitive process imaginable. You strip, put on violet steampunk goggles and lie still in a lit tube, feeling your molecules denature. Ten or twenty minutes pass with a feeling of combined doom and tranquility; it is exactly what I imagine dying to feel like. All the while, the same thing is happening to other women and men lying prone in tubes nearby. On average, more than 1 million Americans visit a tanning salon each day, 70% of whom are Caucasian girls and women aged 16 to 29 years. I'd bet that a good portion of these girls inhabit Marin County.

Back to Pacific Tan. After our machines went off––they were on timers according to how much we paid––we got dressed and ate the fun-size Milky Way bars that had lain atop the folded towels in our tanning rooms. Then, separately (we confirmed this later) we each located the secret cache of candy bars within our rooms and ate a few more. When we emerged from Shangri La and Nemo's Nautilus, I observed that Alice's tan was much deeper than mine, while she maintained that the opposite was true. Naturally.

Examining our crouton-colored fingers we got back in the Corolla and planned the next tanning session. Moments later, speeding down the 101 with vulgar music blasting and sentimental thoughts of lacrosse players in our heads, it all added up to a productive afternoon. We were still operating under the principle that sexual appeal could be bought, provided we bought the right things. This was an exercise in money-wasting and futility, but it also simplified life. What we lacked was strictly material; all we needed to be more successful at parties was what the other girls had. And to a point, this worked. Fake nails and giant hoop earrings actually did make us feel sexier. We just didn't know what to do with the attention once we got it.

Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. Her website is here. You can find her recent work on TR here.

"The Impulse" - The Flaming Lips (mp3)

"Silver Trembling Hands" - The Flaming Lips (mp3)

"Convinced of the Hex" - The Flaming Lips (mp3)

In Which We Change All The Rules About Food

What Would Steve Martin Eat?

by MOLLY YOUNG

I have a new rule of thumb when it comes to food. If I can imagine Steve Martin eating x, then x passes the test. If not — if he would avoid x or do something comically derisive to x — than I must do the same.

With the looming amount of food options available to modern consumers, the only sensible thing to do is adopt a doctrine strict enough to narrow the field considerably. WWSME? seems as good a food doctrine as any — it is slightly glamorous, generally healthy, and pleasingly flexible. (You can replace Steve with Harold Ramis, if you wish.)

The introduction of WWSME? into my food habits clashes with a parallel attraction toward the raw vegan lifestyle. A skeptical attraction, but still an attraction. The appeal of raw veganism lies in its adherence to frivolous rules, its celebrity following, and its promiscuous deployment of the phrase 'glowing skin'. The promise of 'glowing skin' is enough to ensnare me in any cult.

Perversity also plays a part in my raw vegan interests. I perpetrate the fascination, in other words, merely because I do not want to. "We stand upon the brink of a precipice," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his famous description of perversity. "We peer into the abyss — we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain."

Yep! That's it. There's nothing that makes me want to punch a wall with more intensity, for example, than raw vegan branding. Purveyors of vegan goods tend to replace the sensory claims of generic products with ridiculous-sounding spiritual claims. Instead of emphasizing great taste, companies like Love Force will emphasize the "edible love, light and happiness" contained in their snack foods.

In good moods I find this innocuous. In bad moods I find it irksomely foolish. Not particularly misleading or symptomatic of capitalist ills, just foolish. "You've waited your whole life for this," the Love Force packaging claims. Inside, a speckled brown turd awaits.

Have I? Waited my whole life for this, I mean? Love Force has sent me a box of lumps to sample, each one made only of nuts, dried fruits, seeds, agave and flavoring agents. Flavors range from the safely appealing (chocolate orange, chocolate mint) to the inventively tasty-sounding (mango pecan, fig ginger) to the odd but plausible (chocolate lemon).

Each bar costs $4.99. Each is chewy. Each is filling and tastes exactly like what it is — which is to say, delicious. The Fig Ginger and Goji Lemon taste like whole pies compacted into a portable snack. When you taste such non-negotiably good things, it makes you wonder whether the raw vegans aren't on to something after all. It was certainly very nice of the company to send me a boxload of them to try.

But then, my aversion to the raw food vernacular is rhetorical, not visceral. These are bars that come in packages printed with a radiating infinity sign on the header, like some weird detail edited out of a David Mamet play. These are bars that equate, beneath the nutrition info, being vegan with saving our planet — a mantle of importance that I'm not sure most vegans deserve. Love Force is not content to make amazing bars (which they do); they must also "raise human consciousness through the power of organic raw vegan food nutrition and other positive mindful products." And this is where we part ways.

Would Steve Martin eat a Love Force bar? Maybe if he was offered one free of charge. He'd read the name in that good-natured jeer into which his voice has matured, and then he'd consume it without complaint.

And so, in a fashion, will I.

Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. She blogs here and here, for Spike Jonze's new movie. She twitters here. You can buy her books here. She is the creator of Salad & Candy. She last wrote in these pages about a seminal moment from her youth.

"Little Bird" — Imogen Heap (mp3)

"Earth" — Imogen Heap (mp3)

"First Train Home" — Imogen Heap (mp3) 

In Which Molly Young Recalls A Seminal Moment From Her Youth

Inflatable

by MOLLY YOUNG

A seminal moment in my youth (pronounce it "yoot") centered around a set of inflatable tulips. Tulips made of beach ball material, weighted at bottom to stand upright when inflated from a nozzle at the base. Tulips from the dEliA*s room decor supplement that arrived one day with the catalog — a poster-sized insert that could be unfolded to reveal model bedrooms made of purchasable components.

The money for the tulips must have been saved-up allowance. I didn't have the skills to generate income in 5th or 6th grade like some kids do. It's not that I wasn't clever enough to come up with schemes; I just didn't connect the scheming with the pleasures of spending money, so there was little motivation to sell cookies or walk dogs.

The tulips cost $20 for a set of four, I believe. Plus $4.95 shipping and handling. In the dEliA*S catalog they were displayed in a room conceptualized to look like a suburban neighborhood: there was a picket fence, astroturf, and lots of sherbet-colored bedding. Kids have a mind for objects. They will often zero in on desirable or interesting objects and focus on these to the explosion of the overall environment. Remember the lily pads in Frogger, the molasses cattails in Candyland, the battleship playing piece in Monopoly? Everyone will have his own memories of object fetish, whether the source be TV, videogame, illustration or movie. The tulips fell into this category.

It was an age of clothing catalogs. dEliA*s was number one, followed by Alloy, MoXie Girl and others that advertised in the back of Seventeen. Receiving a free catalog felt almost like a gift, and I subscribed to every one. Ordering an item involved saving up money and then appealing to Dad to let me use his credit card and repay him in cash. "And the name on the card?" a salesperson inevitably asked when I called to place an order. "David Klein," I said. "It's my dad." There was always a small worry that this would ring suspicious and I'd be barred from ordering.

I ordered the tulips from the suburban-concept model bedroom. The tulips arrived 7 to 10 days later in an envelope, not a box. Very disappointing. Insensibly (but understandably) I'd imagined them being shipped already inflated, as they were in the picture. They had a great plasticky smell: the smell of newness. A smell richer than my dad's Land's End cashmere sweaters. Here, in these vinyl tulips, was luxury. I could not have cared less for real tulips — there was a city park a few blocks away filled with flowers. Flowers were everywhere.

I brought the tulips to my room and blew them up. Our house faced west and my room received afternoon light; the blinds were white and wooden and did not approximate but suggested picket fencing. The carpet was blue, not astroturf, but close enough. Lined up beneath the windows, the tulips satisfied every hope invested in them.

It would be interesting, here, to find a way of quantifying past excitement. Or experiencing it in a way more vivid than recollection. At any rate, I stayed in my room a long time to be near the tulips, and when I went down to dinner it produced the unexpectedly greater thrill of allowing a return to the tulips, a kind of manufactured surprise when I opened the door to find them standing there.

It can't have been the first time I found satisfaction in tinkering with my environment, but this is how I remember it. Acquisitions followed: an inflatable chair (uncongenial), a yellow faux-fur bedspread with denim lining (still have it), sherbet-colored sheets from dEliA*s. The tulips are gone. Like most crucial tokens of childhood, their importance is understood only in hindsight. Having enjoyed them so intensely for a year or two, it was inevitable that they be discarded with equal vigor. A Goodwill store around the corner from our house made it particularly easy to shed unwanted items, and off they went. I wonder if my parents even remember them.

Molly Young is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Holding Out For A Hero" - Doveman (mp3)

"Let's Hear It For The Boy" - Doveman (mp3)

"Dancing in the Sheets" - Doveman (mp3)

"I'm Free (Heaven Helps The Man)" - Doveman (mp3)

"Somebody's Eyes" - Doveman (mp3)

"The Girl Gets Around" - Doveman (mp3)

"Never" - Doveman (mp3)