The next day, my sister Christina told us about her tanning friend who had had 10 cancerous melanomas removed from her back.

We theorized that we could use sunscreen to protect ourselves from the harmful rays, but still get tan. I looked up tanning on the internet that night, and got an awful view of it.

By coincidence, there was a skin cancer quiz on CNN the next morning.

Stacy and I took a couple of days off, but were back into the salon within a week. 14 minutes for Stacy, and 15 for me.

We both kept mentioning to each other how tan we looked!

Two days later, I took in 15 minutes and Stacy took 16.

Two or three times a week we visited the tanning salon. We got to know the small staff, and started to recognize a few of the other patrons. I had assumed that tanning clients would be almost exclusively women, but men seemed to be about 25% of the clientele.

Stacy and I both had to work to avoid odd pale patches on our skin. Because of the arrangement of the bulbs in the bed, a little less UV light was hitting our sides, and the tops of my shoulders were fairly pale. 

Stacy told me that she had heard of people developing long tan stripes down their bodies, because of the bulb layout.