Lip-Synch
Dave was partially of Italian descent and thus had more or less olive skin. He wasn’t swarthy looking, but he generally took sun well. That meant that he tanned easily and wasn’t prone to sunburns. He had had a sunburn or two during his life, but not often and not easily. He used protective lotion, but only if we going out to sunbath or it was particularly hot. He was not a lather-up-rain-or-shine kind of guy.
Once when he was touring Southeast Asia, he had gone to Phuket in Thailand and had roasted himself to a golden brown. He liked the way he looked with a tan (who didn’t?) and just felt healthier and happier with that look on (as do most people). From there he went to Hayman Island on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. As he was going out to go on a dive boat, the young crew member with the big floppy hat shoved some SPF 60 lotion at him and just said, “Slip, Slop, Slap, Mate!” Dave had looked at him like he was speaking Tagalog. “Slip on a shirt, slop on the lotion and slap on a hat, it’s what we say here down-under where you blokes have cooked away our Ozone Layer.”
Dave nodded and just said over the grind of the boat’s motor, “I’ve just come from Phuket and have a solid tan already.”
“Sorry Mate, but we can burn through a Phuket tan in about two hours down here. Put it on or you’ll be sorry,” the attendant said with total seriousness and a demanding tone. Dave decided to heed the warning though he was disinclined to believe it was needed. By the end of the day on the boat, Dave was darker than he had ever been in his life. And judging by the burns on the shoulders and noses of more fair-skinned tourists who had Slip, Slop, Slapped all day long, Dave was glad the attendant had been so insistent.
Once when he had gotten into a debate/disagreement with his brother-in-law about the harm and benefits of the sun, Dave had done some research. His brother-in-law had just had a nasty carcinoma removed from the side of his nose and was not feeling very kindly towards the sun. It was funny because that same brother-in-law loved living the casual Southern California lifestyle. He wore shorts and an UnderArmour t-shirt almost every day and always sported a healthy tan. But now, under the knife, so to speak, he had become a big proselytizer for sun protection.
Dave loved a good debate with his bro, even if his wife Sandi always eyed him with suspicion that he would cause a rift in the family by pushing his point too far. There had been a prior instance over Tubas and Sousaphones that was epic and had just barely scarred over. The point is, he had learned to do his research and when the whole sun, good or bad thing had cropped up, Dave had gone to the internet and drilled down into a Google search. What he had found were many articles discussing the harmful impact of sun due to varying degrees of empirical evidence that it can and generally does add significantly to skin cancer risk, particularly in older people. But there was one article that seemed very learned and balanced in both a scientific and anthropological way that explained that the sun did more good than harm to people. This was not a specious argument that the sun grew plants and plants were necessary for life. This was about the specific physiological effects that the sun had on the human body (also largely applicable to animals, though the fur can purposefully or inadvertently affect that). It seems that the inducement by the sun in making the skin produce vitamin D is quite critical in averting many diseases. In fact, when measured in terms of attributable deaths, insufficient sunshine far outweighs the deleterious effects of sun on carcinogenic growth on the skin. In other words, too little sunshine is worse for you than too much.
Add to that the serotonin release that is induced by sunshine and the feel-good that generates. And let’s not forget the “I look gooood” element of a nice tan. So maybe all this worry and caution about the sun is over-rated. That had been Dave’s very compelling argument against his brother-in-law. But what had ensued was like the Nicholas Cage bakery scene in Moonstruck, when he says, “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice. I lost my hand!” Well, Dave’s brother-in-law had lost a piece of his nose to the sun, so that ended that argument. But Dave remembered the facts he had unearthed and was always ready to debate anyone claiming harmfulness of sunshine.
Then Dave went on a motorcycle ride up through Death Valley. It was early in the season, and only just over 100 degrees. But Dave had worn an open-face helmet rather than a full-face helmet, specifically because he knew it would be hot and a “half-lid” helmet was simply more comfortable. He had on his Ray Bans and he knew his face well enough to know he needed lip balm to protect his lower lip. His big mistake was not reading the lip balm tube more carefully. Weren’t they all SPF protecting? Turns out they are not. Dave had chosen a lip balm that was just a moisturizer and had no SPF. It took that one day in a valley that cooked the first dinosaur egg on a sun-heated rock, to fry Dave’s lower lip to a blistering red, throbbing and quivering mass of flesh.
The rest of Dave’s face was burned, but not painfully so. His olive Italian skin had done its job. But his lip was not Italian, it was something Nordic and sun-fearing. Did the Vikings have SPF lip balm? How did they survive? Dave’s lip looked like a slimy red slug the next morning. Lathering on Super-Lysine for Herpes Simplex Labialis made it REALLY start to look like a nasty slug or leech. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.
After five days of healing, it still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but Dave could do nothing but not grin (hurt too much) and bear it. The lips seem like minor body parts that deserve minimal attention right up until something like a sunburn befalls them. Dave knew this too would pass, but he was reminded that now that he planned to spend more time in Southern California, he needed to moderate his vitamin D production and serotonin addiction and balance them against the burn quotient. Dave felt he needed to lip-synch his use of the sun.