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| "Baby Jesus, please make Zombie Boy pretty like the rest of us so we can accept him as he should be, no matter what it does to his acting career." |
After every outdoor recess my third-grade teacher, Mrs.
Yaroschuk, would make us boys wash our hands in the boys’ room and then march
single-file past her desk to show her that we got the job done right.
I, unfortunately, had inherited a mild skin condition that
would flare up at the most inopportune times—like just before opening day of
the 1969 Outdoor Recess Season.
This condition manifested itself as a crescent of very dry
skin that ran from the base of my index fingers to the first knuckle of my
thumbs. When that skin got dirty—which was always since it was attached to the
hands of a nine-year-old boy—it stayed dirty. I couldn’t wash it away no matter
how hard I scrubbed.
Mrs. Yaroschuk, even more unfortunately, did not know about
this condition and demanded to know why I refused to wash my hands. When I
tried to explain sotto voce—since,
at this point, we had captured the collective attention of the entire class—she
declared to the class that I was lying.
Then, in the middle of
hand-inspection time, she grabbed my arm and dragged me into the boys’ room so she could “get that dirt off your hands myself, believe you me!”
She did try, I’ll give her that. But after about two or
three minutes of rubbing my hands under hot tap water with coarse brown paper
towels slathered in industrial-strength liquid soap, it dawned on her that I was
telling the truth.
Today there are a number of products on the market that
would prevent such humiliations (mine and Mrs. Yaroschuk’s). And one of those
products—Dermablend—is currently taking its turn as an Internet darling with a
contrived video campaign called “The Camo Confession,” created by Agence Tuxedo,
an ad agency in Montreal.
The premise is clever: A beautiful person sits before a
camera, tells you something wonderful about herself, and then makes her “confession”
by wiping the Dermablend foundation from her face and revealing a striking skin
condition. It’s fascinating, really, when you see that these “normal” people
are actually suffering from rather extreme skin conditions caused by things
like lupus, severe acne, and vitiligo, a skin disorder that causes the loss of
skin color in patches.
The reveal, and each person’s story, makes a powerful case
for why some people feel strongly that they need to use Dermablend when they’re
out in public, and why—were it not for our reactions—they really wouldn’t have
to.
Real feel-good stuff … until you meet Rico. Rico, you see, suffers from … well, let’s let him tell his
story.
“Many people would say that I’m different just because of my
skin, but I don’t feel that way. In many ways, I’m just the same as anyone
else. I am accepted by a lot of people who are … who are different, and in the
same position as I am.
“No matter what you’re faced with in life, always feel proud
of who you are, for what you are and not to let others’ judgments get in your
way. Today, I feel proud. I did what I had to do. And look at me now.”
Yes, Rico is suffering from … tattoos. Hideous, debilitating
tattoos that he presumably paid people to etch over his entire body. But did he
let that self-inflicted affliction slow him down? Quite the contrary! Rick “Rico”
Genest, aka Zombie Boy, is a DJ, an actor, and a model … not in spite of his
skin condition, but because of it.
God bless him.
According to Agence Tuxedo, “Above all, you wear a Tuxedo to
make an impression.” Well, guys, the impression I get from that video is Rico in a tuxedo T-shirt, because it says, “I want to be pitiable, but I’m
here to party.”
