Life’s Swell, Susan Orlean (2002) [film]
The Maui surfer girls that inspired Blue Crush
I was fourteen-years-old when the movie Blue Crush came out. I took one look at Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, Sanoe Lake, Mika Boorem, tan, strong, and ripping around on surfboards and in convertibles, and saw exactly the kind of girl I wanted to be. I never wanted to be the girl in a dress and makeup. I wanted to be covered in sand in a mis-matched bikini, never having brushed my hair.
The article, “Life’s Swell,” from Outside Magazine, delves into the lives of Maui’s real surfer girls. The article opens like this. The rest is just as gritty, just as magical.
The Maui surfer girls love each other’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it—yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits.