I've always loved to read. Growing up, my parents would take my brother and I to the bookstore before we went on road trips and we were allowed to pick out several books each. Then my parents would have to hide the new books so we wouldn't crack them open before we left. Then they wouldn't let us even open them in the car until we hit the Ohio Turnpike, so as to make them last as long as possible.

Being back in NYC means relying on public transportation. Commuting via subway gives me at least 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon to get in some good, quality book time. So, while the MTA does the driving, I get to enjoy whatever Barnes-and-Noble-bargain-table-under-$5-fiction I happen to have in my bag.



My current read is called "The Crimson Portrait." The back cover reads:

"Spring 1915. On a sprawling country estate not far from London, a young woman mourns her husband, fallen on a distant battlefield. The eerie stillness in which she grieves is shattered as her home is transformed into a military hospital to serve the war's most irreparably injured. Rattled by the intrusion, the young widow finds unexpected solace in the company of a wounded soldier whose face, concealed by bandages, she cannot see. Their affair takes an unexpected turn when fate presents her with an opportunity: to remake her lover - with the unwitting help of a visionary surgeon and an American woman artist - in the image of her lost husband."

OK, for $4.98, it sounds like a decent premise. And I tend to enjoy historical fiction, so I bought the book....and...it's ok. I can see why it was on the bargain table. Not terrible at all, but not exactly the twisted love story I was thinking it would be. Anyway, I assumed when I read the back cover that the surgeon was going to reconstruct the soldier's face to look like the widow's husband. SPOILER: Instead, the American artist constructs a mask based (unknowingly) on a picture of the widow's husband. Stick with me. There is a point to this, I promise.

See, the whole hospital is for patients with facial injuries. The artist gets a photograph of what a patient looked like before the war, makes a mold of his injured face and adjusts the mold to match the face in the photograph. She then uses the mold to make a mask that looks like the soldier's former face, which covers up the injured areas so the man can go out into society again without having people stare at his scars. More or less.

I started to wonder if this was something that really happened during the war.

Now, I don't know about you, but I tend to Google things a lot. Something sparks my interest or curiosity and it gets typed into that search box and I check it out. So, I decided to see if this mask idea was something that really happened.

And...it was!

I found a few sites that referenced Smithsonian photographs and other archives. And then I stumbled upon www.projectfacade.com While browsing through the website, you can see photographs and detailed notes of cases much like the ones in "The Crimson Portrait." And there's even an old silent film of soldiers being fitted for their masks. Just know that if you check out the site, some of the photos are pretty graphic. I mean, they're pictures of war injuries and different stages of cosmetic surgery....so you've been warned. (Although I tend to have a bit of a weak stomach with that kind of thing and I just thought it was so amazing what they were able to do that I didn't mind too much.)

I really just wanted to see if the premise of the book was based on fact, but seeing the true stories really struck me. I think it is absolutely fascinating and completely amazing what those doctors were able to accomplish. To be able to figure out how to reconstruct someone's face??!? To plan out how to move this piece here and graph that piece there and wait for this to connect to that and support it for this long and...and it's all ALIVE. And attached to a HUMAN. I think it's incredible. How come I've never heard about this before?! I mean, we all knew about Heidi Pratt's new boobies hours after they rolled her into recovery...

Anyway, it's a random subject for a blog entry, but I felt like it should be shared. God made us humans able to do some amazing things. I'll stick to the singing and dancing, though.

Happies for the day:

*the weather!

*Steve French making me laugh so hard during rehearsal I had to stop singing to wipe the tears from my eyes.

*I found a gift shop and a yarn shop here in Hoboken.

*The apartment windows are open. Fresh air.

*Melanie Stringer moved into her new condo. Welcome home!