BEYOND ARIEL
If you thought mermaids were merely a myth, think again, says Megan Dunn
Warning: If you tell someone you’re writing a book about professional mermaids their first impulse is often laughter. Don’t expect to be taken seriously. Not yet. “What is a professional mermaid?” That’s the first question.
IN 2005 Kazzie Mahina, a 27-year-old professionally trained dancer, walked into Sydney airport with a large brown bag slung over her shoulder. She’d sold everything she owned and bought a one-way ticket around the world.
“It was a very Saturn return thing to do,” she says.
Her handmade shoulder bag was cut to shape, two giant butterfly wings protruded from the top. “I used to get looks, people just could not figure out what was in that bag.” “Is it a harp?” they asked. In airports across the world, little girls clocked this babe with hair down to her bum passing by, bag over her shoulder, then turned to their mothers and said, “Mummy, there’s a mermaid.” The mothers corrected their daughters, “don’t be silly,” then Mahina pulled out her business card. On it: a photograph of herself as a mermaid.
And in the bag? Her tail. She unzipped it and let the girls touch the silicon scales. Her tail felt fishy, raw and rich with a coral colour. Mahina made it in the workshop of a special effects designer on the Gold Coast, using teaspoons to press each gooey scale into shape before the silicon set, then attached the dried scales to a neoprene base, and decorated the tail with goldflecked paints. The process took months. “It really looked like I had just stepped out of the ocean, peeled off my tail, shoved it in the bag, magically waltzed to the airport, and bought a ticket to find more turquoise waters, and why not?”
Because mermaids don’t exist? Wrong. Mahina is one of the forerunners of the current mermaid phenomenon. In the early to mid 2000s the first professional mermaids surfaced on the internet. It’s a self-made career, carved out by pioneers like Mahina and her friend Hannah Fraser, an underwater model and ocean activist, and Linden Wolbert, a PADI master scuba diver who runs her own educational ocean web series for children: Mermaid Minute. All three women are beautiful blonde trailblazers who’ve helped establish the mermaid as an advocate for marine conservation and created a new industry including a market for swimmable fabric and silicon mermaid tails. Mermaids have their own lingo too — check your mersona and invest in a good merwrangler for getting in and out of that pool and don’t get fin-slapped honey. (P.S. Your shellphone is ringing.)
Sexism, silliness and the special-effects industry shape the world of the professional mermaid and it’s much deeper than you might think. When I asked my Twitter followers if anyone knew of any professional mermaids in New Zealand, I got sent a picture of Wellington’s Mermaid Strip Club. Ha, ha. Look through the portholes of The Wreck Bar in Florida and you could watch MeduSirena and her burlesque