Saturday, August 2, 2008

Bodies (with and without skin)



-Last night was Penny's last performance with The Wedding Singer. For those who don't know, Penny is the actress who played the rapping Grandmother in the show. So what does one do to celebrate with a 74 year old woman? Why take her to the Australian male strip show of course!
-We were able to get a block of comp tickets to see Thunder From Down Under, so we had a group outing last night after our show ended. As it turned out, the Wedding Singer group made up at least 1/3 of the audience, and I have a feeling we were one of the rowdiest audiences that the Aussies boys have experienced here in Atlantic City.
-Unfortunately we could have been the quietest audience that they ever had for all the difference it made. The show itself was pretty lame. The guys looked really awkward, and the choreography was sub-par boy band dancing. We were able to get Penny up on the stage for a bit of audience participation. That was a hoot!
-Today I decided to go see the Bodies: The Exhibit presentation at the Taj Mahal. This is one of the touring exhibits of human bodies that have been preserved with a polymer and then posed and dissected to show various parts of the anatomy. I very much enjoyed seeing the preserved bodies. In fact they were far more entertaining and informative that the live bodies from last night!
-I was especially glad to see the exhibit given the fact that I just finished reading a book called, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Stiff is not a book for everyone as it deals with topics like putrification, human dissection, and various other ways a human body is used after death, but I loved it. The most amazing aspect of the book is that everything is told in a lighthearted yet respectful manner. My favorite bit being the joke about "I (liver sign) my Pekinese" bumper sticker. Okay so you have to read it to understand the joke.
-In Stiff the author describes the process of preservation that is used on the bodies that were in the exhibit. Everyone has been asking me if the bodies are creepy, and they really are not. They look realistic and plastic at the same time. The best way to describe them would be an anatomy textbook come to live.
-Sadly I reached my information overload midway through the respiratory system, and did not spend as much time in the second half of the exhibit as the first. Aside from the full body figures, my favorite part of the exhibit was the blood vessel displays. It was really surreal to see only the blood vessels of a person's left foot. Very cool!
-Given my obsessive tendencies (and copious amount of free time), I can foresee making a return visit. Maybe they will let me start at the end and go backwards?!?

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