The Saga of Lucille Iacovelli: Plastic Surgery Nightmare, or Something Else?

The story of Lucille is hard to ignore, once you watch her video footage. At first, looking at still images, it would be easy to pass her off as just another vain middle-aged woman who overdid it on the plastic surgery and wasn't pleased with the results only because she didn't come out of the hospital looking like Ursula Andress circa 1965, or whatever. But if you watch the videos, words other than vain and dissatisfied come to mind: obsessed, unhinged, desperate, miserable. Perhaps even neurotic, deranged or suicidal.

The story in a nutshell: In 1997, Lucille had a facelift. The results were excellent, so she booked a nose job for just 8 weeks later. Both procedures were performed at Massachusetts General by prominent, respected doctors who will remain nameless here (you'll come across one surgeon's name plenty of times in Lucia's videos). This is when things went seriously wrong, Lucille contends. She insists the doctor somehow undid her improperly-done facelift while working on her nose, causing her chin and cheeks to droop jowlishly for the first time in her life. The sagging continued, worsening rapidly throughout the year.

That wasn't the worst part, though. The damage allegedly caused by the facelift and rhinoplasty interfered with Lucia's ability to breathe, and this condition also worsened rapidly. By the time she started documenting her ordeal on video, she claimed to have tremendous difficulty breathing. In order to breathe properly, she had to maintain an awkward posture that caused continuous pain in her neck, back, and throat, and made a normal range of motion impossible. Eventually, she resorted to using hairclips and other household items to hold the folds of her face in strange positions that enabled her to breathe more easily for short periods of time.

It is Lucille's obsessive documentation that perplexes. As she stretches, contorts, pulls, and pushes her pliable face in all directions to show us what plastic surgery has wrought, her voice is tremulous with outrage and panic. She sobs as she claws at the folds of her skin. She addresses the camera with wooden spatulas jammed against the side of her neck. It becomes difficult to imagine her leading anything like a normal existence - not because of her face, which is still quite attractive and not at all repulsive - and not because of the breathing problems, which don't visibly intefere with her ability to speak and move - but because the mistakes she believes were made with her face seem to be at the center of her universe. The life she lives now began and ended with that surgery, a dozen years ago.

Subsequent corrective surgeries haven't helped. If anything, the problems have been exacerbated by them.

Lucille says that doctors won't take her seriously. They're covering for the surgeons and for each other, functioning as cogs in a vast medico-fascist machine. She has been silenced, ignored, threatened, intimidated, blamed, ridiculed, and marginalized. She is the mistake that won't go away.

Plastic surgery isn't the time-lapsed perfection we see on Extreme Makeover, and it has been seriously botched even on one-time patients. So Lucille's claims can't be dismissed without close examination. On the other hand, an obsessive or perfectionistic personality can inflate relatively minor flaws into drama of epic proportions.

The surgeon Lucille blames for her agony has sued her, claiming she threatened to kill herself live on the Internet. She denies this. He insists there is nothing physically wrong with her, and has demanded that online comments and videos critical of him be removed. She points to this as more heartless intimidation. And so on.

This long, strange battle could have more at stake than meets the eye: Patients' right to publicly criticize what they consider to be substandard care.

I don't know what is wrong with Lucille, but I know that her condition says much about our society no matter how you look at it. Watch, read, and reach your own conclusions...

Luciacovelli (Lucille's YouTube channel)

Lucille's website Losing Face

Mind-Bending Sculpture

The imcomparable Ron Mueck. No trick photography here; the scale is real.



The haunting, beautiful underwater sculptures of Jason de Caires Taylor



Sculptor Gregory Barsamian creates deceptively simple kinetic sculptures, then uses their movement + strobe lighting to give the illusion of transformation. Video clips on his website show cherubs morphing into helicopters as they fly around the room, human figures emerging from the heads of dreamers, and little guys walking through the pages of a book/cake. Just...wow. Go to the sculptures section of Barsamian's website to see videos; be warned that the sculpture "Shuttlecock" is very literal!

Swedish Rhapsody

The creepiest numbers station ever, with appropriate visuals.

The Stone of Destiny

I have to see this movie. In 1950, four Scottish students really did "abduct" the famous Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey. They returned it to its proper home in Scotland, where it was said to have been used in royal coronations for centuries before being captured by Edward I. It remains a figure of mystery, devotion, and controversy, which isn't surprising given the British love affair with weird rocks.

Secret Lives of Famous Chefs

Julia Child

Before she was John Belushi, Julia Child was a spy. Sort of. Okay, not at all. But I think she had some sorta security clearance, or something.

Like Martha (below), Julia Child had no formal training in cooking, yet her French cooking skills and her almost insanely cheery disposition landed her a TV show in the '60s.

Before that, she played basketball and studied history at Smith. During WWII she was refused by the Navy because of her height (6'2''), but found that the OSS wasn't at all picky. She mostly did filing and typing, but also participated in the development of a shark repellant used to keep sharks away from explosives intended for German U-boats. She later married a high-ranking OSS cartographer, Paul Cushing Child.

Martha Stewart

Though not exactly a chef, Martha is totally anal-retentive about her cooking. During a lesson on baking chili-lime cookies (ew), she glowered at the camera and barked, "And don't you DARE use lime juice or pre-grated lime peels!"

But Martha dared to do even naughtier things than that in her spare time, like dumping nearly 3000 shares of her ImClone stock one day before it took an 18% nosedive. Now we all know that Martha is smarter and just all-around better than anyone else, but SEC found it hard to believe that she could have predicted this one. So she was in a bit of a pickle. Or rather, she was in a bit of a hand-picked heirloom cucumber in a cilantro-and-lime brine.

Asked to explain herself whilst chopping cabbage on CBS's Early Show, Martha made everything as clear as her Waterford crystal by saying, "I just want to focus on my salad." Three years later, she was in a West Virginia prison camp. Her Merrill Lynch broker was in a Vegas prison camp.

"Sir" Robert Irvine, the Walter Mitty of haute cuisine

The host of the Food Network's Dinner: Impossible has always had killer cooking chops, but that wasn't enough for him. No, he had to go and tell a bunch of credulous Yanks that he graduated from the University of Leeds (as if that's really anything to brag about), assisted in the construction of Chuck and Di's wedding cake (as if that's really anything to brag about), and was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. The Americans happily invested thousands to help him start two restaurants, Schmooze and Ooze, which never actually opened. The St. Petersburg Times set the record straight: Irvine was a non-knighted bloke who received most of his culinary training in the Navy, and he didn't have a thing to do with any royal wedding cakes.

A Creepy Advent Calendar

Creepy Christmas is counting down with short films based on the gothic-kitsch artwork of Beck Underwood. The project is helmed by Glass Eye Pix, the outfit of indie horror director Larry Fessendon (his 2006 film The Last Winter falls into the "Polar Gothic" genre that I love), and is a showcase not only for Beck's art but for various indie horror directors and animators.
In my opinion, there's nothing spookier than old dolls.

If you like this sort of thing, I also recommend the eerie dollhouse dioramas of Marnie Weber...

The Gnome of General Guemes

General Guemes, Salta Province, Argentina, is the site of several recent sightings of a tiny figure wearing a pointy hat. Though several of the town's 29,000 residents have reportedly caught a glimpse of the duende (gnome or elf), only teenager Jose Alvarez has managed to capture the being on video. And a bizarre-looking video it is...
Snopes points up the hoaxy quality of the video (which does smack of the bogus alien-arm cellphone vid shot in Mexico), and as the second video demonstrates, it's not difficult to trick out one of your buddies as a gnome.