“Do These Rubber Boots Come In Red?”

I have always coveted the job of a Movie Makeup Artist. Every time I watch a film with fantastic special effects makeup, I daydream of glittery movie sets with sliver Airstream makeup trailers. I picture room size mirrors with bright makeup lights lined up like florescent soldiers and a single Star seated in my black director's chair ready for their transformation. So, when the chance to be one of the lead MUA's for a Feature Film presented it's self I was pretty quick to sign on the dotted line!

I will never forget the day two producers sat across from me in the little artsy spot that I had spent a so many months creating. “Da Wata Fountin” was my new lover, a cement building on the dirty sea facing street called Front. I discovered it one day, as I walked past the food stalls temporally abandoned by their renters as the buses loaded up and the villagers piled in to await the long dusty ride home. Now, that the humid hum of the daily market deflated, and been quickly swept up, the night life of the local bars began to ignite. This was a street of contradictions, a busy market during the day full of smells, colors, and noise and at a night a dimly lite den of drug use and prostitution. This complex location become my canvas. I had spent two years turning a boring cement cave of a building into a tiny twinkling mirage where life floated gentling into the night in the form of children's laughter and jungle drums. Now, I was being asked to leave it all behind 4 months earlier then I had planned and return like a prodigal child to my first career as a Makeup Artist. “We may be making a film here...” the two producers began.

My love affair with Belize was changing and I was being given an opportunity to take a whole new direction. I had spent the last four years forgetting what it felt like to be a Makeup Artist. My transition from California Makeup Artist to Belizean Jungle girl was such swift and relatively painless process that I truly can't explain how it happened. It just did. I had arrived like so many others with suitcases packed to the brim with all the things one thinks would be essential in the Jungle. I brought a complete REI store of collapsible camping gear, waterproof wicking pants with multiple zip off solutions, areo-bed, mosquito netting, and a suitcase full of all my desert island cosmetics (the one’s I just couldn’t live without), trillions of ounces of bug spray, sunscreen, malaria pills and other protective solutions. Little did I know that so many of these precious items would never be used or better yet would be traded for more useful things like friendship and a place in my new community.

Now, after four years in Belize I knew that I no longer represented anything close to what a Makeup Artist looks like and let's face in the Beauty Industry looks are everything. I had thrown all of that pretense off and run head first into another world and now the trip home seemed so strange and frightening...