Hannah Fraser arguably has one of the coolest jobs in the world. She is a mermaid.
That's right - Fraser is a professional mermaid and underwater performance artist, and she was one of the first in the world. A childhood dream come to life, Fraser made her first tail out of plastic table cloth material and pillow stuffing at 9 years old. She said she was "obsessed" with the idea of mermaids.
"For six months I swam around in that thing until it disinigrated," Fraser said.
One interview casting for an underwater modeling job, however, proved that Fraser had real skill with swimming and holding her breath. She got the job, and it was a defining moment in her mermaid career.
"It was more for fun and an artistic hobby," Fraser said.
Fraser started merging free diving with performance art and modeling - swimming with great white sharks, tiger sharks, humpback whales, dolphins, seals, turtles. At that point, her career as a professional freelance mermaid took off.
Fraser's work uniform consists of a real, functional tail that each take about four months to create. Hand sewn out of wet suite neoprene material and monofins on the inside, Fraser said she can actually swim faster with her tail on than without it.
She brought the sea to the desert with previous performances at the Mirage and the Luxor, and was featured in Cirque du Soleil's "One Night for One Drop" at the Bellagio.
Fairy tales aside, however, Fraser takes her job on land as an ocean activist very seriously.
"As I traveled around to these beautiful, pristine places, I started to notice over the years they were disinigrating," Fraser said. "There was pollution and rubbish on the beaches, plastic in the oceans and animals being killed in ridiculous numbers.
Several years ago, Fraser and other ocean advocates caught wind of massive dolphin killings in the coastal city of Taiji, Japan. Surfing out to a restricted cove, in a peaceful protest of the slaughters, the surfers were being attacked by the local fisherman. The footage was captured and later featured in the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove."
"It was a pretty scary experience," Fraser said. "But what we managed to get out of that was world wide attention."
As a result of the film, dolphin meat was taken off the shelves of local supermarkets and out of school lunches. Unfortunately, however, Fraser added the dolphin slaughters in that area continue at abysmal rates.
Las Vegas hotels are known for bringing far away worlds to one stretch of six miles on the Strip, but animal captivity is not one Fraser said she supports.
"They are just not built to be in such small, confined spaces," Fraser said. "No matter how well they're looked after, they are built to be out in the ocean swimming freely."
Should hotels such as the Mirage ever decide to do away with their dolphin habitats, Fraser said she would rather the animals be put in more natural tanks integrated with sea water.
Hannah Fraser, professional mermaid