My life as a fish

Well, it isn't every day that I turn into a merman.

See, the Favorite Daughter decided to take a makeup class, which happened to include a special-effects segment. I was supposed to have been her model the night she put somebody in drag (not that she was going to tell me before we actually got there...), but I had a meeting that night.

Darn the luck.

However, as it turned out, she had two other nights to abuse me. The bald pate was, perhaps, not entirely successful. (And if you really want to compare, go here and here - it's not like I haven't sported that look before.)

Not a big fan of the bald cap, by the way. Your hair gets gelled back, it takes forever, and your body heat, which normally escapes out the top of your head, has no place to go. Plus the glue holding it in place is a major-league pain to get off, and you're pulling little balls of it out of your hair forever.

I got most of it out before going to work the next morning, although I found a suspicious little ball of goo behind my ear when my glasses didn't want to come off about noon. Plus, knowing that I had a full-face makeup thing coming that evening, I shaved off my beard and mustache for the first time in years.

But her final project was a fantasy thing, that didn't really need to reflect reality, so she dreamed up this fish-man and plopped me into an appropriately pirate-themed director's chair.

She had a whole little story worked out regarding the merman, and the fact that the sequins were actually camouflage as I drifted around my horde of sunken treasure. But that hardly matters here.

But there I sat, very literally for hours, as she slathered goo on my eyebrows to cover them up, a layer of primer base coat of an appropriately fish-belly white, highlighted with multiple other colors, glued sequins on my face (I'm pretty sure they were mostly just because she wanted, at the end of the evening, to glue sequins on my face), and gave my skin a scale texture.

Personally, I think the scales are the best part. And the secret? Fishnet stockings: they're pulled over your head, and the makeup is applied through the stocking, giving her a simple way to end up with the texture she wanted.

It's been years since I last had fishnets over my head, and thank god this pair was clean - you know, they don't do as much to hide you from security cameras as you'd think... (Don't judge. It's rude.)

The gills worked pretty well, too. Entirely non-functional, of course (I'm not falling for that again), but they had an interesting texture - latex, with a light top layer that wrinkled them slightly.