Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Montara Hewgill. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Montara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you have any thoughts about how to create a more inclusive workplace?

When you think “mermaid”, the first images that probably come to mind are Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Madison from Splash, and maybe even the world famous Weeki Wachee Mermaids in Florida. Beautiful, young women, petite human on top and sparkling fish on the bottom. Pale skin, tiny waists, thin arms, little clamshell bikinis, and long, flowing hair. Slender sirens with beautiful, ethereal voices luring sailors off the deck of their boats and into the dark waters below. It’s an image of traditional beauty standards, despite being so deeply rooted in fantasy, myth, and fairytale that mermaids could literally be depicted as anything. There’s historical reason to even believe the first mermaid sightings were actually of manatees! But the more I looked though the porthole into this magical world of women in tails, the more cookie-cutter it seemed to appear. Despite not fitting into that mold, my determination to live a life full of fun and wonder, and bring magic and smiles to others, propelled me forward to chase the dream of every child while playing in the pool: I wanted to be a mermaid.

All my life, I had always been the chubby kid, but after the first time the word “fat” was used to describe me and I learned the cruelty that was intended by it, it changed me at my core. My outgoing, bubbly personality withdrew and I tried to make my body and my self smaller in a world that, despite what the after school specials and Disney movies taught us, judges people for how they look on the outside rather than who they are on the inside. It took years of trying to diet and exercise and wearing all black because it was slimming before I realized my shape had hardly changed but I was deeply miserable. No matter what I seemed to do, I couldn’t get my body to look like the other girls around me, Every time I stepped on the scale, I hated myself a little more and wanted to exist a little less. The only thing that seemed to ever make a difference was teetering on the edge of an eating disorder. As I started to wither away, people started to be nice to me and tell me how good I looked, but I was starving and I was still sad. That was when it occurred to me how screwed up the whole thing was. The person I was hadn’t changed, only how I looked, and only one of those things should really matter. I finally realized I had to stop trying to fit in to a mold that would never be my size before I drowned in my own despair.

I had my mermaiding debut back in 2016, tucking my muffin top into the waist band of my fabric tail and pulling the bra band of my self-painted mermaid top down to cover the back rolls. I was still fat, but I had never felt more beautiful. Little did I know, I was embarking on a journey that would require extreme endurance and engage a level of physical activity I don’t think anyone can properly prepare you for: hours spent constantly moving in the water as the heat is drawn out of your body, swimming only from the strength of your core without using your arms or legs, breathing exercises to teach your brain and body not to panic as you hold your breath for extended periods of time while your oxygen levels decrease and your carbon dioxide levels build. Even through years of all that, my body shape still hasn’t changed (at least until the pandemic, but that’s a different story). But still before every appearance since the very first one, I steel myself, bracing for the harmful words that people might say to me upon seeing my not-thin self in a mermaid tail and bikini top, waiting for the laughter, the jokes, the ridicule, but… it never came. Instead, I received an outpouring of wonder and amazement, adult’s and children’s eyes lighting up when they saw me, and soft conversations with women my age or older of “you are so beautiful and so brave”, “you inspire me, I would love to do something like this”, and “I wish I had a role model like you when I was a child” came flooding in. By not letting my size or fear of what people might say stop me, (because honestly, whatever they would have said I’d already said to myself while standing on that scale), I became what may very well have been one of the first, if not the very first, plus sized merfolk since the original manatee.

My personal slogan has become “Mermaiding is for every body” and I’ve used that belief to build my team, the Sugar Sirens. I seek to create a diverse and inclusive atmosphere where everyone can find a place to be themselves. My core team is made up of queer, plus sized women with the whole team touching a variety of demographics. As mermaids and mermen, we portray these beautiful, make-believe, fantasy creatures. There is no cookie-cutter for how we have to look and it’s our uniqueness that makes us who each of us are, and that is the real magic.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Mermaid Montara and the Sugar Sirens are original character performers who dress in realistic fabric and silicone mermaid tails who have come on land to see where the people are. We do meet-n-greets and photos, share stories of our adventures, answer questions about being a mermaid, educate about the environment and keeping our waters clean, and on especially special occasions even sing siren songs. We do all sorts of events such as festivals, corporate events, birthday parties, bachlorette parties, and Renaissance Faires, both on land, in water, or in our traveling mermaid tank. We sell treasures we’ve “scavenged from shipwrecks” including pearl oysters, jewelry, crowns, pirate hats, and more! We are universally loved by adults, children, and animals, and are always eager to SEA where the next adventure will take us.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

We started small for sure, with no idea how big we would become. Our first gig was a birthday party for one of our pre-school students. It was a little rocky but we learned so much and have improved with each event we’ve done. People loving what we do and word of mouth has been what’s best helped us to building our reputation as a “showstopper that mesmerizes all ages” and has been what’s really helped us in building our list of repeat clients and helping us find new ones. One of the best emails we can possibly receive starts with “We are holding an event and so-and-so recommended you…”, whether that so-and-so be a previous client or another professional mermaid team, it’s always an honor to hear that someone enjoyed us and has mentioned us to others. It also helps that Netflix just came out with a documentary about our community, called MerPeople, which helps us explain to people what we do. But it’s always flattering to have an event organizer come back after an event and say “we’ve been getting such wonderful reviews and feedback, and everyone loved seeing the mermaids!”.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

This story is about the struggle of being newer in the field and trying to make due on cheaper equipment until you can afford the “real stuff”. We worked with a Renaissance Festival for 5 years. Now if you’ve been to a festival, most vendors either have a permanent structure such as a house within the festival village with their storefront on the bottom and their camping space above, or they have those beautiful, stiped tents with thick canvas and solid metal poles. As we were the mermaids, our space was in the center of a valley by our lagoon, and we had to create a space not only for us to vend, but a changing area and lagoon entrance at the water’s edge. We joined this festival in their very first year, and while there were buildings around the outside perimeter of the village, there was nothing by the pond. This being our first year as well, we figured we could get away with tent space of about 10×30 with walls for at least a 10×10 space for our mermaids to store their stuff, change into their tails, and lay their wet items out to dry. Now if you don’t know how much those “renaissance accurate” tents are, the answer is: A LOT. Especially for that amount of space. And they take multiple people to assemble and usually only 2 of us would arrive on site after the 4.5hr drive after a day at our real jobs with hardly two hours left of sunlight. It just didn’t seem feasible. As we only had a single year contract and wouldn’t have the time to erect these tents at any of our regular day festivals, we couldn’t justify spending the over $10,000 to get The Right Equipment. So we made due with EZ-Up popup canopy tents. And they worked really well for what we needed! At least until mother nature and her summer storms came roaring over the surrounding mountains and into the valley. Have you ever seen a popup tent in a mini hurricane? No matter how well you’ve secured them, the ground is now several inches of mud, the stakes are doing nothing, and the tent is attempting to fly to OZ no matter how you cling to its previously sturdy steel legs. So here you are, standing in water, clinging to this metal frame, in a freak lightening storm. It was not a good time. By the end of that weekend we had to toss one of the tents and buy a new one. That wasn’t a cost we had expected. We bought a sturdier one, which was of course, more expensive, but it wasn’t in our budget as this event was very fun but not very lucrative, so it came out of my pocket. But we learned from that storm, we improvised and improved: we duct tapped the legs of our new tent to metal rebar we had hammered into the ground. You know what happened next storm? The tent didn’t fly away, as the wind started to pick up and pull on our tent, we quickly released parts of the roof to allow it to flap instead of turning it into a windsail, tossed a tarp over our personal items, and moved to a safe location to wait it out. Probably for the best, as the weather saw our tent attached to these steel stakes driven into the ground and raised us by snapping the legs right off. Another tent in the trash, another that had to be purchased THAT NIGHT before we opened the next day. By the time we had gone through several single year contracts, increased the tent size to two 10x20s for smoother lake entry, and the money I had personally sunk into these “disposable” popups getting wrecked at least twice a season and having to buy a new one on the fly, out of pocket, was rapidly throwing us deeper and deeper into the red. Had we bought The Right Equipment at the beginning, it would have saved us a lot of stress, looked better overall, and been a much better investment than $1000 on popup tents each season. So take my advice: make the investment. Buy The Right Equipment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mermaidmontara.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mermaid_montara/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mermaidmontara

Image Credits
Melanie Portraits, Felicia With Fins, Larry Bradby, Jen Rieker