At Large: Looker By Colin Sargent

CHUCK CAMPBELL

L KER.

Maine/s New Plastic Surgery Graphics Imaging Computer

Looker. You. 32,000 colors. Sit over here, please ...

Okay, now look over there. Tilt your head up. My face jumps onto the Summagraphics Till screen of the most sophisticated and highest resolution imaging computer in thestate ofMaine. Who's kiddingwho? Right now, it's the only one in the state of Maine! And the temptation is Faustian: graphic technology so advanced that you can get a sneak preview of your new face before you've ever been touched with a knife. "What's itgoing to look like,Doc?" I say carelessly to Dr. Hill while sipping coffee and imagining bandages being

BY COLIN SARGENT

taken slowly offmy face. He knows I'm burning with curiosity and trying to act casual, but it gets ahold of me anyway, all those secret times in high school when I wished I were just a little bit... "Let's smooth out the nose a little," begins Dr. Hill, just like that. "Yes, the nose!" I look onto the screen and see a perfect nose resting incomprehensibly on my face. "All right. Now we'll try a chin implant and take a little off that neck line... " In seconds I look as I would if I'd never eaten those hamburgers. It's intoxicating... slowly the face emerges that would have made my lifeso much easier!A Gladstone Gander face so lucky that I'd find $20 billsjust lying on the street, no longer a mug but a radiant countenance no high 'school cheerleader could ever have turned down for a date. It's allthe more amazing because it's happening in prosaic Gardner, a place where girlsstillwalk in and ask ifthey can be made to look like Farrah (yes, post-"Extremities"!) Fawcett and Brooke ("Sahara") Shields. Faust inGardner, a mile from the Dairy Continued on page 46

-J tj

The author's before-and-after sequence as sized up bythe SUMMAGRAPHICS imaging computer.

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