MYRTLE BEACH — Musings from under the beach umbrella:
• Twenty feet away, the skinny young lady in the bikini with platinum blonde hair and oversized sunglasses was not the real Paris Hilton, much as she imitated the look.
• With a borrowed straw hat, I may have been confused for another celebrity — former Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden.
• Struggling artists should steer their career paths toward the real money — tattoos. I studied a parade of ugly tattoos, some that must have cost their owners four figures. It’s shocking what some people will pay for a tattoo. For the same money, they could buy an original painting from an emerging artist that could grow in value and be a source of pride for a lifetime. A tattoo droops with age.
One woman had tattooed on her side a long scripture verse from Psalms, “For He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways …” The rest was hidden beneath her bikini bottom, not that I was leering. She parked close to Paris Hilton.
A man had a huge tattoo of the Budweiser logo that stretched with his stomach’s girth. Another man had a huge devil on his back. There were countless others, young men and women, sporting a vast assortment of ink. Once the realm of drunken sailors, tattoos are now main stream.
• A telephone message told me of James Coleman’s death. My old Mayodan Moravian Church friend, 85, had perfect attendance at Sunday School for more than 50 years. His father, Raymond, during much of the past century had been …