Coma Scars

My kids can’t look at my right arm now. It creeps them out. Not often a 60-year old Mom creeps out her kids. Is that success? It certainly shows the success of the art of makeup as done by real pros.

And I got this look just by rambling on the other side of the tracks. There was a pedestrian crossing in front of the Umbrella Corporation pushcart, so I took advantage of it and crossed the trolley lines there. If I’d looked at a map, and I did have one with me, I’d have gone back to the convention center. I hadn’t realized Harbor Drive runs at an angle southwest, so that crossing took me to a street several blocks north of my destination, the Hard Rock Hotel.

On 1st Street a nurse was handing out hospital bracelets. Not the cool kind they used to give babies, with beads spelling out their names. But the lame kind with your name printed from some computer file, shoved in a sleeve and closed with a snap you can’t open, so you have to cut it off, risking cutting a vein when you do. But it advertised an A&E mini-series, Coma, to be broadcast over Labor Day weekend.

I ambled on to the Coma hospital (a trailer in a parking lot at 1st Ave. & J Street) to check it out. I found two lines, and a really pleasant rest area complete with fountain and benches (for patients’ visitors). One line was empty, the other had about 10 people in it. Being an old Comic-Con hand, I knew the empty line meant lameness awaited those in it, so I became the 11th person in the other line. Turns out what you got was the coolest (to me) and grossest/gruesomeist (to the kids) applied make-up I’ve ever had put on me.

You lay on a guerney while a doctor “operates” on your arm. I'd always heard you can judge the quality of the surgeon by the quality of his stitching. This one needed to go back to medical school. As a surgeon she was awful. As a makeup artist she was very talented. 

I was informed by other members of the hospital staff that they had 1500 of these scars to apply to people. If that’s true, they’re going to have to really speed up the process. There were 8 stations, and it took 15 minutes just to apply mine. Other stations were taking longer. So using an average of 20 minutes each, they could apply about 25 an hour. It would take them 60 hours to apply them all over 4 days, working 12 hours a day. Not going to happen.

They took my picture in front of a green screen, and I really do look like I’m in a Coma. And they filmed me screaming at the screen with my picture on it. Guess they get tired of photogenic young adults.

All that and the show does look pretty interesting. You can watch the videos they were showing at http://www.comaconspiracy.com