When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (great reads TXT) 📕

People are amazing. Just when I think I've seen it all (so far as the crazy things people do in the name of beauty or in the way they present themselves to the world) some ding-a-ling comes along and dons something so outrageous thinking it's high-fashion, the only words that come to my mind are 'Does your Mama know you left the house looking like that? ' Or there are those sad moments when I see someone trying to recapture their 'Yeah, I do look that good!'' glory days they had before Mother Nature got hold of them with her 'Ha ha...try to fix that with a little squirt of Botox' stick and whacked them upside their ever-loving head. 

Of course, if it weren't for folks like that - this Southern Belle would have to find other things to write about...Thank goodness for vanity!  

Enjoy. Laugh. And don't get upset if you see glimmers of yourself as you read these pages! It's OKAY. After all, we've all been there. 

AND LIKE I ALWAYS SAY TO MYSELF WHENEVER I HAVE ONE OF THOSE TRAGIC MOMENTS...

If you've read When a Southern Woman Rambles...Tragic Tales of Beauty, Volume I - you'll no doubt recall 'The Tale of the Creepy Mole Lady'. The following is an equally disturbing recollection of another sun-fried woman etched into my sweet Southern psyche...

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One summer, a few years ago, I took my daughter to the pool with her best friend. Unlike previous summers wherein we went to the pool at least two if not three times a week, we had not visited the aquatic zone all that often this particular year because my daughter, who at the time was 13 years old, was busy with enough camps, family trips, and other activities that she was too busy to ask to me to take her. But as it so happened, the time did come to pass when she asked, "Hey, Mom, can we go to the pool today?" And I, feeling an urge to dip my own toes into the chlorinated cement swimming hole, agreed.

When we arrived at the pool, I headed straight for a lounge chair beneath one of the huge mushroom sunshade umbrellas. I spread out my thirsty beach towel, sprayed on my second coating of sunscreen (the first having been applied at our house before I ventured out to frolic beneath the big ol' burning ball of gas in the sky), and got out my giant bottle of filtered water. Once I made myself comfortable and had my iPod playing, I found myself looking around for the excessively tanned, Creepy Mole Lady and her equally sunbaked daughter and granddaughters.

But, to my surprise, they weren’t there. At this point in the story I suppose I ought to say something like 'being a good Christian woman, I immediately said a little prayer for their health and well-being' (after all, it had been nearly a year since my eyes had been transfixed by Creepy Mole Lady's three impressively creepy moles...anything could have happened during that time) but lo, I did not.  Not that I didn't want to...I did.

However, at about the same time I realized Creepy Mole Lady and her family weren't at the pool, I spotted another woman whose appearance grabbed hold of my attention the way a snazzy pair of leather boots takes hold of a person with an extreme shoe fetish.  

That's right. There was another seasoned woman at the pool that day sporting an über tanned, well-worn, leathery-looking hide that caught my eye. And this is the story of that woman and what my eyes beheld on that day in the presence of the woman I call the 'Frighteningly Freckled She-Pirate'.

Hold on to your swashes and buckles because this is...

The Tale of the Frighteningly Freckled She-Pirate.

Let me begin by saying that the She-Pirate appeared to be somewhere in her late 50s (although her age could have been closer to 50 than 60…after all it’s hard to get an accurate read on such exquisitely sun-ripened flesh). And her hair, which had obviously been chemically lightened a couple of months prior to my seeing her as it bore the 'sign' of a head of hair in need of some serious root control because it had about 3-inches of tell-tale dark hair growth coming down from the crown of her noggin. Likewise, the lower portion of her hair was heavily tinged in a vibrant shade of ‘swimmer’s green’. No doubt thanks to her love of peroxide coupled with frequent visits to the pool.

*By the way, many people think hair turns ‘swimmer’s green’ because of the high concentration of chlorine found in swimming pool water, but that’s not actually the case. Copper is the culprit (essentially, that green tinge is the same sort of patina one might find on a copper dome) and it builds up when the pH level (not the chlorine) is too high in a swimming pool. What's more, one of the fastest ways to bring the alkalinity (high pH) in a pool down is to use an acidic compound like...chlorine.*

However, I digress. Now, getting back to the She-Pirate, if I was forced to give her interesting, two-toned follicle look a simple, easily identifiable name where one could draw an immediately recognizable mental image, I think I'd have to call it a ‘Hairmaka’ because when I saw it, I was immediately reminded of a friend of mine named Jacob and the Yamaka he wears.

But hold on! There’s more to the She-Pirate than simply her sunrise, sunset Fiddler on the Roofesque coif...

More indeed! Because I've yet to really discuss her tan. A tan which practically screamed out that the She-Pirate had long ago embraced the carcinogenically foolish notion of 'sun-kissed' skin = 'healthy skin'.  

Please note, before I go any further, I would like to point out that the She-Pirate was not a carbon copy of the Creepy Mole Lady mentioned in Tragic Tales of Beauty Volume I. No. You see, contrary to the Creepy Mole Lady who shimmered like a bronzed geriatric beacon while she baked herself by the pool thanks to all the tanning oil she slathered onto her skin, the She-Pirate didn't use oil. That's right. The She-Pirate neither glistened nor glimmered like a treasured piece of fleshy-bronze slathered in a vast array of lotions, potions, creams, and gelatinous UVA and UVB absorbing goo she could qualify as a walking solar panel. I suppose you could say the She-Pirate was the solar opposite of the Creepy Mole Lady. (Oh, Lord have mercy! The solar opposite...I slay myself sometimes!)

Heck, as far as I could tell, the She-Pirate didn't use anything on her skin because I guess - and mind you this is only a guess - she probably thought that the ½-inch thick 'over cooked Idaho russet baked potato' colored dermal shield she had built up over the decades would protect her from the harshest rays of the sun. And I suppose she had a point. Sort of. After all, an elephant’s skin is nearly an inch in thickness and I’ve never heard of an elephant getting sunburned. Though, now that I think about it, I’m fairly sure elephants don't 'burn' because they're smart enough to throw mud, nature's sunscreen, on themselves to protect their skin.

Speaking of baked potatoes…

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the even best looking potatoes have blemishes on them? Granted they’re unsightly, but they don’t really affect the flavor of them so we overlook the flaws and enjoy the tasty taters anyway. Of course, a gaggle of lumps, bumps and freckles on the outer skin of a potato are one thing but when a living, breathing human being has skin riddled with lumps, bumps, and freckles…it’s a bit freaky.

And the only reason I mention this is because the She-Pirate’s flesh was riddled with a myriad of freckles, most of which appear to have spread out and merged together creating huge, slightly olive green mega-freckles that were splattered across her skin as if she were a walking Monet...you know, from a distance you don’t really notice she’s splotchy, but up close...it’s a different matter altogether. However, I should point out that She-Pirate’s skin wasn't just shades of brown with a hints of burnt-freckle-green scattered here and there because her nose, cheeks and brow had a ruddy, pinkish 'persistently on the edge of a burn' coloring, too. Only instead of looking leathery like the rest of her physique, the rosy, burnt-flesh coloring on her face was accentuated by a spider's web of wrinkles.  

Truthfully, I don’t mind wrinkles; they add character to a person and lend an air of sage wisdom to our elders.  In fact, I've known and respected many older women who had the gentlest faces with the softest wrinkles; wrinkles to be proud of in their elder years. But that doesn’t mean I recommend dehydrating one’s face like beef jerky to speed up the process!

Of course, given the fact that the She-Pirate was also a heavy smoker, her lips had those weird 'smoker's wrinkles' that come from holding a cigarette between one's lips for extended periods of time. If you're a smoker, you will totally understand what I'm talking about. But if you're not a smoker, imagine holding a drinking straw between your lips for extended periods of time and the way your crinkle together when you purse them like that!

Now, you're probably wondering how I knew she was a heavy smoker, right? Maybe the following will explain my smarter than the average bear deduction... You see, every 45 minutes, when the whistle would sound for adult swim to begin wherein her kids (or maybe they were her grandkids) had to get out of the water so the grownups could swim 'child-free', the She-Pirate would dash...not ‘walk with great purpose’…I mean dash like an Olympic sprinter outside the pool area to stand, barefoot, on the bright white, sun-soaked concrete and smoke at least 2 if not 3 cigarettes during the 10 minute break.

And since I was listening to my iPod, I couldn’t help but giggle as I watched her gingerly lift one foot and then the other foot every few seconds since the cement was so hot she couldn't stand still without the soles of her feet burning. Now that I think about it some more, I might have actually laughed out loud during one 'adult swim' while I watched her because her actions reminded me of watching Charlie Brown and the gang dancing in one of those Peanuts cartoons. Especially since she kept bobbing he head from side to side. I suppose you could call it a nicotine-induced jig, although there were parts of her that really should not have been jigging, or should I say jiggling in public especially in a...bikini. But not just any bikini! No. It was a skimpy bikini!

Bikinis are not for the timid…so on that point, I have to give the She-Pirate a well-deserved two thumbs up. Because she wore that bikini like she was one of those buxom, hard-bodied women on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. Unfortunately, her bosom had