Port Louis, Mauritius: “The sun burns your pink little body and you shrivel up like a delicate flower.”

I would jump up on my soapbox and tell you how completely unwarranted and grossly unfair Jamie’s comment is except for one thing. It’s true.

Unfortunately, my DNA is inescapable. There’s not a damn thing I can do about my pink, freckled, unsexy Dutch epidermis. I call it The Dutch Disease.

Mike Myers captured the problem perfectly with the Dutch villain in his 2002 comedy Goldmember. It’s my dermatologist’s favorite movie. I think he’s buying a ski chalet in Aspen with the money he’s made cutting and freezing pre-cancerous spots off various parts of my anatomy. (YouTube removed the original video, so I have no choice but to use this odd video that compares Goldmember to the Pope. Sorry.)

If it weren’t for freckles and precancerous spots, I wouldn’t have had any color at all.

This subject is only worth mentioning because we took a walk through the jungle today, and despite the fact that I was under a thick green canopy all day, my face now looks like Jamie warmed it up in a frying pan.

Sigh. The Dutch Disease, indeed.