Who mourns for Slim Goodbody? Slim became a fixture on public broadcasting in the early eighties, dancing into our hearts by proudly showing us his. He played the guitar, sang of the virtues of the apple and performed push ups, all while his guts were hanging out for all to see. Of course, Slim wore a lycra suit festooned with the muscles of the body and vital organs. The look wouldn’t work for us, but somehow he made it work for him.
These days Slim just can’t compete. His shtick has gone the way of the anatomical edutainment buggy whip. Wearable artistic renderings of our inner workings just don’t hack it when we now have the real stuff to gawk at. Take for example the cadavers perpetually on parade at Bodies . . . The Exhibition.
I walk the exhibit with Sandra Kidney, marketing director of the Seattle Acting Guild, the organization hosting the exhibit through the end of April.
“Do you have a name for him?” I ask pointing toward a cadaver holding aloft a conductor’s baton like a Leonard Bernstein sans skin.
“No. We’ve never thought to give them names. Don’t know why. Well, we call The Thinker the Thinker because he is posed just like the thinker in Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, so I guess he has a name,” Kidney explains.
I’m struck by the dramatic lighting here. Each cadaver (there are 22 I am told, mostly male) is illuminated by warm and very direct lights. The effect is like that of watching a vaudevillian comic in a spot light, stuck in a clear amber of stage fright, and then promptly removed of his skin by a less than appreciative audience.
These are bodies that have been preserved in a special process whose secrets are as closely held as the formula for Coca Cola. Worldwide, only a few have achieved master level in the science and art of body preservation and display. A German doctor named Gunther von Hagens pioneered plastination back in the seventies. He is on the record as wanting to artistically combine plastinated parts of both humans and animals in order to create a “mythological” beast. He has also expressed interest in wanting to pose used up human soul shells so that they appear engaged in an act of love. What the good doctor is envisioning, who the hell knows? I doubt the people who make Viagra are up to this challenge.
These particular plastinated cadavers I’m looking at are from China. China is a global leader in the precise dissection and display of human bodies and body parts. Kidney explains that no one does a body better.
There is a body posed so that it is bicycle kicking a soccer ball. Another is poised to serve an imaginary tennis ball, his skeletal musculature, liver, GI tract all exposed for close inspection. One of the most amazing bodies is presented in such a fashion that his muscles are flayed out around him like strips of prosciuto. He is a man who appears to have unfortunately run into a wind tunnel set to maximum, forcing his outer layers to be ripped off and all of his muscles torn from their tendons like so many flapping flags. Slim Goodbody was never nearly as much a drama queen.
Even though this is a weekday morning, the hall is still crowded with the living, many of them kids.
“The children particularly love it because the show is so educational. They learn so much about the body and how to take care of it,” Kidney adds. I watch as several children point at a dead man posed as if he were preparing to throw the discus at a very special Olympics. They point at the man’s penis and titter among themselves. “ Teachers have found that our program really complements their science and human biology curriculum. We even have med students coming in from UW saying they learn something from the exhibit.”
Kidney escorts me past a display case in which a body is displayed in long cross sections as if the poor guy had an unfortunate meeting with a full-body deli slicer. I ask how well the show is doing in terms we living use to measure success of a business venture.
“We’ve had over two million visitors come to our shows in New York, Miami and Las Vegas. The show in the Tropicana Resort had to be extended by popular demand.”
I am suddenly overcome by a cacophony of strange but imaginary sensations, sights and tastes. As I gaze upon the sausage-like small intestine of a Chinese man playing American football, I contemplate the potential though probable co-location of Bodies . . . The Exhibition and the buffet at the Tropicana Casino.
“Are you okay?” my guide asks.
“Fantastic. Now you say these bodies come from China, but do we know who they are? Is there any paper trail?”
Kidney squares her shoulders and stiffens. She squints a bit like Clint Eastwood smelling an ambush right around the next bend of the colon. She might have anticipated this line of questioning when I asked earlier about names. Not just nicknames the janitors give the cadavers when the front doors are locked and the floors are being buffed. Of course, they had names. It’s just that nobody knows them.
“The Dalian University from which the cadavers were received have guaranteed that the bodies are of the unidentified or unclaimed. The Chinese government allows medical schools the right to use such cadavers for medical training and educational purposes.”
“So this tennis player here was more than likely some poor Chinese country peasant who was unlucky enough to die while on vacation in the big city?” I ask absently, thinking afterwards perhaps I’m barking up the wrong spinal cord.
Not everyone buys the story that the stars of Bodies . . . The Exhibition are just John and Jane Does — or whatever their appellation would be in the Middle Kingdom. Cheng Wu, a Chinese dissident who spent five years in a forced labor camp for the crime of counterrevolutionary activities, thinks it is possible he knew the previous residents of some of these cadavers.
“Many of my friends died in the prisons, some students,” he explains to me during a call from his home in Miami. “I had the strangest feeling I know some of these guys ”
“You mean you’ve seen the exhibit?”
“My son wanted to go after seeing an advertisement on TV. I learned the bodies came from China only after going, but again I had the strangest feeling. It was very fascinating, but also strangely familiar.”
I ask him what his lost friends would think about the show. Wu says he’s not too sure then yells at his kid in the background to turn down his Playstation. He then says something most whimsical.
“I think they would want to be holding something else other than footballs and tennis racquets and music batons. For example, maybe . . .” I can hear Wu’s grey matter spinning inside his skull from all the way across the country. It’s as if I can see right into his head. “. . . maybe the Declaration of Independence or the torch of the Statue of Liberty . . . or a cup of Starbuck’s?”
The last one makes him chuckle. Starbuck’s invasion of the Forbidden City is in the news right now. The smell of change sweeping the land reeks of slightly burnt coffee, which the consumption of, Slim Goodbody might say - assuming he’s still employed, helps one stay regular. That’s edutainment.
Names have been changed to protect the fictitious