Las Vegas Weekly

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On Saturday Bodies … The Exhibition celebrated its one-year anniversary at Luxor by offering patrons free massages and free cupcakes. Also on Saturday, I toured Bodies for the first time. Lucky coincidence—no?

Bodies showcases 263 partial specimens and a dozen head-to-toe, full-body displays. One is posed as if pitching a baseball, another as if shooting a basketball and another as if conducting a symphony.

Turns out the pitcher wasn’t actually a pitcher (when he was alive), and ditto for the b-ball player and the conductor. When the white-lab-coat-clad curators revealed that much to me, I wasn’t disillusioned; I was existentially intrigued. How interesting, I thought, that a man could spend his entire adult life as, say, a plumber, then donate his body to Bodies, then have his remains propped up for the rest of eternity as if he were a tightrope walker. Next best thing to reincarnation.

After the tour, I plopped down on a springy lounge chair and received a reflexology massage from one of the Academy of Healing Arts’ student masseurs. “It’s good for your body,” he assured me. Then I ate a miniature cupcake, baked by The Cupcakery ... which wasn’t as bad for the body as a properly sized cupcake would have been.

Okay, I actually ate four cupcakes: one Bavarian crème, one vanilla buttercream and two red velvets. I figured if I ate to the point of heart attack, Bodies might lay my remains back down on the springy lounge chair and use me for the Digestion section.