Swimming with the Swans: A Mermaid Tale

I’m back again with the third installment of The Mermaid Tales. As a mermaid, I swam with fish, clowns, other mermaids, pigs, ducks and swans.

Okay, I hear all of you oohing, swans, they’re so pretty. And they are. You see them floating like white clouds, long necks dipping for a sip of cool water as they swim along. So beautiful. So peaceful.

Clearly you have never been a mermaid. Swans are mean little buggers, maybe not intentionally, but I tell you, the mermaids did not like the swans.

During one part of the show called the Picnic, the mermaids would swim out from the volcano and use their air hoses to raise the lily pads. The lily pads, once upright, were about ten to fifteen feet tall.

Then each of us would sit on a lily pad, wave at the audience in the submarine, and take off our face masks (so they could see our lovely faces). Keep in mind that when you take off your face mask under water, you can’t see squat. And that’s when the swans would come. Silently paddling, watching us from above. (Can you hear the shark music?)

Now, I don’t know whether they were looking for fish or worms or algae or what, but they loved to settle in above us, reach down their long necks and try to rip the floating hair right out of our skulls.

We’re trying not scream (yes, you can scream underwater), keep our face mask on our lap, hold onto the picnic bag and the air hose, and smile. All while ducking and trying to stop our hair from floating upward to within reach of the swans.

Now, I like swans, just not above me.

Management eventually moved the swans out to the river.

And my hair eventually grew back.