An Explanation and a Story

After my post about aging, Patty at Fit by my 50th asked me a question…“BTW, what is that profile picture about? :-)”

As I mentioned in that post, my first hub was an artist, and he did lots of pictures of me. Some were beautiful, some were interesting, and some were kind of strange, including the one I use as my profile. Besides being a photographer, he produced many other kinds of art…jewelry, sculpture, multi-media, you name it, if it was artistic and fun to make, he would try it.

One of his other specialties was glassblowing, which evolved into neon art. So that profile picture was taken around 1983 and shows me with neon glasses and a neon halo behind me. I just remember the glasses were really hard to keep on while he took the picture. I had to hold really still and not move my face.

One amusing story about his artistic endeavors (well, it’s amusing now, it wasn’t at the time)…for a while he was in to making “life masks.” He would make a plaster cast impression of someone’s face, then he’d fill it with silicone which would result in a rubbery face that looked like the person asleep (expressionless with eyes closed).

I thought it would be kind of cool to have a life mask of myself, so in preparation to make the mask, we covered my face with Vaseline to keep the plaster from sticking, and also put straws in my nose so I could breath during the process. Then he piled plaster of Paris on my face. The first time we tried, he didn’t use enough plaster and the cast broke when we took it off. So…we decided to try again.

This time, he really piled the plaster on heavily. An interesting aspect of plaster of Paris is that it heats up as it cures. So after about 5 minutes, it started to get really hot on my face and since it was so heavy, I started to get a little uncomfortable and claustrophobic. We decided to remove it but…Ooops!…We had forgotten to re-apply Vaseline. Which meant that the mask was now stuck to my eyelashes and eyebrows and we couldn’t get it off. I just remember panicking and saying “get this f’ing thing off me!”

We ended up literally ripping it off…which included ripping off my eyebrows, eyelashes, and some of the hair from my hairline. The weight and heat of the plaster had also caused bruising across the bridge of my nose and two black eyes. The most interesting thing was that the rubbery face that resulted had… eyelashes and eyebrows and a hairline.

Ex-hub did use the mask to make some rather strange sculptures:















Meanwhile I spent the next few weeks trying to explain to co-workers what had happened to me. After all, I looked like I had been punched out...and my eyes looked really strange without lashes & brows. I’m not sure anyone believed the true story, but who could make up something like that?