You Must Be This Creepy To View The Exhibits...

I left work early today to check out Cadavers on Display, also known, less colorfully, as BODIES... The Exhibition. "Cadavers on Display" is a more succinct title for the show, though, because it boasts twenty-two real live human corpses on, well... display. I have one word to describe the show: de-licious! I mean, ew.

Has anybody else noticed the recent abrupt fall in terms of how far my entertainment dollar will get me? It's worse than buying gas. First, movies went up to ten bucks and then $11.25, then the Museum of Modern Art raised their admission to twenty bucks, and now we have Corpses & Friends charging me twenty-five dollars to get in. Kids under twelve get in for only nineteen bucks, which I guess is a bargain if you have some freak child who wants to see gastric polyps up close and personal. Still, if I'm gonna be gouged for an anatomy lesson, I might as well just go to med school, where they'll at least let me touch the cadavers. You're not even allowed to take pictures at Adipocere Sculptur-estival, although I did manage to get a few blurry shots with my cameraphone before some security nazi threatened to confiscate my phone. I present them here, for your edification, and just to rub it in the face of the Man.

	Inside, we all look like this...
	One of the things the BODIES exhibit teaches kids is that, even if you're totally flayed, you can still play football.
	The corpses weren't that disturbing, being all formaldehyded and stuff, except for their bulging psycho-robot glass eyes and their toenails, which were all green and rotted and infested with that fungus monster thing from the TV commercials.

I'm still stewing, because I really think that for a twenty-five dollar admission, I ought to be allowed to take home a femur or something. Maybe have a sliding scale, like at the $300 Friend level, you get a tote bag and an entire preserved endocrine system.

Not that the show didn't have its moments. They removed the entire central nervous system — brain, spinal cord, nerves and all — from some guy who probably expected his body to be donated to a more worthy scientific pursuit. It wasn't that informative, but it was cool to look at. So was the circulatory system: they took the major organs out of some guy and dyed the veins and capillaries to make them easier to see. The whole "From Zygote To Fetus" part was pretty sweet, too. Oh, and the section on diseases. They had a kidney stone, and a brain with meningitis, and a prime example of penis cancer. (Like I said before, de-licious.) But the big problem with the show is that every single part of your insides looks exactly the freaking same! I couldn't tell my duodenum from my pineal gland. They both look vaguely like some round chunk of modeling clay that they served up in my college cafeteria. I'll stop with the food jokes now.

In the end, if you've seen one vivisected human being, you've seen them all. But someone at BODIES doesn't quite get that, because they'll give you four, cut up in all sorts of interesting, yet not very enlightening ways. I'd say the exhibit was worth maybe ten dollars max, and maybe a fifteen minute wait in line. (Oh my God, the ticket line was worse than at the fucking Shake Shack. It was also an hour or so long, but the guy and girl right in front of me were PDA-ing the whole goddamn time, like five inches from my face. Fortunately, there were also two obese kids in line slapfighting, and they were kind of distracting. But when I'm world dictator, those two lovebirds are gonna be slaving alongside that security asshole in the deepest, darkest plutonium mine I can find. The fat kids I'll make my court jesters.) Seriously, if you're really dying — ha! — to see what you'll look like after shuffling off this mortal coil, I'd say tour a mortuary instead. It's cheaper... and apparently, it's more romantic too.