Burnt

Sonnet forgets the kids sun lotion and Madeleine returns from soccer camp with a red face. I admonish the children to wear sun block - it is not our job to ensure the little rats lathered up - and we have like three tubes at the door including an aerosol spray. Madeleine has fair skin and freckles so she needs to be extra cautious while Eitan has olive skin that seems to get more Mediterranean every summer day, lucky boy. This on my mind since Cancer Research UK reports that sunbeds, which mimic the sun's UV, damage skin cell DNA and can cause skin cancer. Sunbeds are estimated kill 100 bathers from melanoma every year in the UK with many thousands of cases. In fact, Ministers are preparing to clamp down on the cosmetic tanning industry indicating sunbeds belong in the same category of carcinogenic risk as tobacco smoke. Bummer, dude.

When I was a youngster, Coppertone set the benchmark - remember that cute lttle girl getting her white ass exposed by the mischievous puppy? Paedophiles were loving that era. Be scared. Be scared. Coppertone offered sunblock grades from one to three to seven .. now there's protection. Kinda like using using a condom from the the 1970s. Back then, we all got sun burnt on purpose and then it faded or peeled into the perfect, beautiful summer tan just right with a white La Coste and Sperry canvas topsiders. When I was in college I even used cooking oil, you know - for cooking - then fried it up in our back-yard. Every college kid on the East Coast had to return bronzed especially if you were lucky enough to be from California. The mythology and all that. While strangely I spent every summer in Providence, RI, I did go home for a couple of weeks or so before the fall semester and boy did I lap up the sunshine and pssst sometimes a tanning bed. It would have gone against the image to do anything otherwise.

I show Eitan and Madeleine ghastly images of skin caner sourced from Google. I tell them it is a horrible way to die. Photo from the WWW.