People NEED skin. It keeps everything together. Without it, your organs would be hanging out and in danger of getting stepped on, zippered up or buttoned. Ouch! Think about it!

Most people need clothes, too. For the most part, people without clothes are either Aborigines or strippers. There are those who should wear more clothes than others. You know who you are.

Dinosaur exhibits do a tremendous job in recreating what a walking dinosaur would have looked like with just its bones. This is okay. Seeing their bones on display is not upsetting. We don’t feel a very close kinship to a tyrannosaurus. Had we been alive when they were walking the earth, I daresay we wouldn’t have had any warm feelings for them anyway.

However, we can imagine human’s lives.

The Body Worlds Exhibit is now at our local science museum and may be coming to a city near you. Consider yourself warned! The commercials are terrifying and say this exhibit is not recommended for people under ten years of age. I can safely say no one, with the exception of medical students, should see it. Like a trip to the gynecologist or a chapter from “Fifty Shades of Grey”, it’s just as vulgar. And just as unromantic. More on that later.

These are real yet dead people on display. No kidding. “Plastination” as it’s termed, is the process developed to embalm these folks…from the inside out. Kind of like Young Frankenstein’s Abby Normal, it’s a preservation technique like no other.

I wonder how much beer people had to drink to come up with this idea, much less the goofy positions they’re put in. There’s a skinless person posed with a bow and arrow, another on a horse, some more playing cards- as if there is nothing wrong with someone having bent them into positions involving everyday activities. Is it natural to see a Zombie-like stick figure doing dishes or playing basketball????

And it begs the questions: What did these people do in their lives that was so horrible they are now dead museum displays? Is this payback? Did their relatives not get the inheritance they thought they should? Maybe the conversation went like this:

“We’ll fix Grandma’s little red wagon. Yessirree…leaving us with nothing more than a couple of cats and a ceramic bed pan. We’ll show her. Mr. Mortuary guy…go ahead and skin Grandma. We’re going to lend her to a travelling science exhibit where they’ll pose her in outlandish positions and make her life one giant mockery.”

The website states these people gave permission to donate their bodies to science. I get that. Sure. Use my dead body to find a cure for cancer. Or dissect my stomach to find out why I was so fat. Or take apart my brain to understand why I got such low SAT’s. But nowhere would I ever state it’s okay to skin me and become a part of a traveling exhibit. Is this something we need to add in our wills?

“When I die, please do not skin me, parade me from city to city and pose me in silly positions for strange people to view.”

And how are age appropriate children supposed to respond? Most children and a lot of adults I know (unfortunately) can’t walk into a museum without pointing, staring and giggling at genitals on Greek and Roman statues. Or at paintings of nude women and their exposed breasts. From what I can tell, the Body Worlds Exhibit people have masked genitalia making one believe that none existed. Surely, there have to be questions surrounding their absence.

One advantage I can see to this exhibit could be used by Planned Parenthood. Picture this. A fifteen year old and his date, hormones raging, thoughts of groping, bodily contact, and dreams of getting to second base. They go see this exhibit and bam! Exposed tendons, bony appendages and cavernous eyeballs suddenly put the kybosh on any thoughts sexual. This could be a good thing after all.
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There are some clothes which should never be worn by anyone. Stretch pants on anyone over 100 lbs. come to mind. Me in a bathing suit, another.

But no one should not wear nothing. Nudity I understand. Skinlessness I do not. Unless you’re a dinosaur.