“You’re Irish; I know you are because your skin is so white!” This is something that I hear weekly. I don’t mind having skin that’s white as printer paper: I’ve accepted that I’ll never have a tan, but will turn the colour of a prawn in the sun. Being as white as I am causes a stir in some quarters. When riding the subway in the South Bronx, I was sometimes the only white person on the train, which once prompted an elderly black man to exclaim; “sweet Moses – a white girl!” There was another occasion when I was travelling from the South to the North Bronx and a guitarist boarded the train and started singing and passing round a cap for money. He started serenading me with, “this song is for the white girl…I got sunshine on a cloudy day…when it’s cold outside I got the month of May…Talking about my white girl…” Everyone on the carriage laughed and clapped along.
But being white as china is difficult because it’s hard to find the right kind of blusher, the powder that highlights the cheekbones. In the past, I’ve bought blusher that looked good in the shop. But when I wore it in daylight, I was told that I looked like a china doll that had been painted.
Recently, I ran out of blusher and didn’t want to traipse around the shops looking for the right shade. I found myself praying to St Anthony to find me the right blusher; that was cheap rather than expensive, “sorry St Anthony to bother you again, you have more important things to do than find cosmetics, but is there any way that some blusher could just show up?”
I forgot about the prayer. And then one night I came home to find a pot of blusher on my table next to a box set of DVDs. It was almost like the blusher had appeared out of thin air. I had lent the DVDs to an acquaintance of mine and I got in touch with her to ask if she had left the blusher as a present for me. “I just knew that blusher was for you… When I saw it, I thought of your milky skin and just knew that the pale pink would suit you,” she said with conviction.
Since wearing the sparkly blusher, I have been asked if I have been on holiday, because my cheeks glow. It could just be coincidence, but did I not ask St Anthony for a very obscure type of blusher, and that it could ‘just show up’? The right type of rare blusher showed up – as a gift – and it came at the right time. I include a picture of it underneath. Many Thanks, St Anthony.
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