Being half English and half Irish has its advantages. After all, the first half of me once owned 25% of the Earth’s surface, which included the second half of me. The sun’s the problem—the Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the Noonday Sun thing—because if I so much as miss a nickel-sized spot on my face with sunscreen, it turns as bright as the currently-erupting Popocatépetl (a word I like to say aloud over and over) within about seven minutes.
So I went to the dermatologist today for what I call the Blue Light Special, a light treatment that should vaporize the numerous pre-cancers on my face. “You may feel some discomfort,” they said (the young woman who attended to me was wonderful), but this is a phrase I remember hearing as a child when I was about to get a shot. Here’s my childhood doctor and his crack medical staff getting the hypodermic needle ready:
If you think this is the only movie that occurred to me, you’d be wrong. You have to be in a dark room for an hour for the Magic Ointment to take effect, so for an hour I was Papillon.
And here I am, with my hour up, emerging from the darkened room:
Now it was time for the Blue Light Treatment, which works something like this:
Just kidding! But you put your face into a Blue Light Helmet shaped something like Dave’s helmet from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And we all know how that worked out for Dave:
And darn if that blue light didn’t remind you of another scifi movie!
No little space critters, though. After an hour in the dark, you have sixteen minutes inside Dave’s Space Helmet. They remind you:
You have fourteen minutes left.
You’re doing fine. Twelve and a half minutes left.
How are you doing? Only eleven minutes and forty-five seconds left.
Which of course reminded me of:
But I guess I’m glad I had this done. And for the next two or three days, I will look just like one of my absolute favorite film characters!
A Work in Progress 