An activist awakens

On a Saturday afternoon beneath an unforgiving August sun, Sarah Redpath flip-flops across "Main Street" -- the pristine, pretend downtown square at The Streets at Southpoint. She and a friend in high heels are handing out fliers protesting an exhibition of real bodies at the Durham mall.

Sweat is one thing, but the real heat arrives in about 20 minutes. Security guards swarm the women and tell them they can't continue. The reassuring cascade of a nearby water fountain mixes with the murmur of curious shoppers as Redpath explains herself to "the men in the Smokey the Bear hats," then tries arguing with them. Finally she asks the ranking guard if they can just stay and get some ice cream if they put away their fliers.

Redpath and her friend chill out with their frozen treats and watch the line form to enter "Bodies ... The Exhibition." Or as she puts it later, "grandmothers and kids, waiting to spend a Saturday afternoon looking at peeled people."

Redpath hardly recognizes herself. Four months ago, she says, she was an apolitical, work-at-home mother of three, baking treats for neighborhood parties. Now she was obsessed with a popular traveling exhibition that struck her as profoundly dehumanizing.

The summer that Sarah Redpath took on the multinational body-show industry would prove to be a far more frustrating time than she ever imagined. But, for her, it was a far better choice than ignoring it.

The inciting incident

Redpath, 45, is a Pennsylvanian who attended Carnegie Mellon and N.C. State University. She traveled the world in the 1990s while working for IBM in graphics interfacing, a field in which she also holds patents on inventions. Her specialty is troubleshooting system problems at large businesses by understanding the people who work there.

She married another inventor at IBM, settled in Cary and began raising her family and working for IBM part time. Her concerns were typically work- and family-centered -- until the bodies came to Durham.

"Bodies ... The Exhibition," mounted by Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, uses actual human skeletons with organs, tendons, muscles and skin intact to varying degrees. The bodies are sometimes posed playing soccer or tennis. Healthy organs are displayed next to diseased ones. There is a room of fetuses and another room all about skin. A gift shop sells plastic organs on key chains, T-shirts and other souvenirs.

The exhibition opened at The Streets at Southpoint during Easter break, when The News & Observer published photos and an article that described the exhibition and summarized the controversy that has followed it.

Redpath's reaction to the feature story was physical. She said she was repulsed and shocked in a way that she had felt only once before: as a teenager seeing a picture of Holocaust victims. She started having nightmares about the exhibit, and she wrote an emphatic letter to the editor.

"There was something about this that would not let go," she said. "It brought out the mama wolf in me. Something came into my territory that disturbs the kind of world my children will grow up in."

She began researching the issue voraciously. She found that three companies, each with numerous bodies exhibitions, are touring the United States. It's a multibillion-dollar market that straddles a subjective line between educational and grotesque.

Most of the specimens come from China. The bodies are processed through Chinese factories, where workers dissect and preserve the corpses using a process called plastination, which replaces fat and fluids with silicone rubber, epoxy or polyester.