The Eyes Have It
After college, I went to New York City to study acting with the famous teacher, Sanford Meisner. It was the beginning of my acting career. But as any new actor knows, “paying the rent” means working a lot of odd jobs until your career kicks in. And boy, did I have my share. Bar tending and waitressing were the most common, but I also worked on and off for a secretarial temp agency.
Now, this was the late 1970s. It was the time before cell phones and laptops–-hard to imagine now. Typewriters had evolved to be electric, IBMs mostly, and there were multiple landline phones with buttons you had to manipulate.
Having been an English major in college, I was a pretty good typist, and I also had my version of shorthand from class note-taking. My skills were useful to these agencies. The pay was okay and the work hours, flexible, even if the jobs were usually dull.
When the temp agency called about this secretarial job at a New York hospital, I was surprised at how well it paid, but it required a minimum of a 2-week full-time commitment. Full time! Oh my God, the anathema to an actor… a 9 to 5 job.
But I really needed the money, so I agreed to the assignment, put on a dress and heels, and went that first morning to report for my secretarial work.
At the personnel department, a kindly looking middle-aged woman greeted me and pointed to a chair in front of her desk.
“Well, Miss Lipari, I am so happy you can take on this two-week assignment. It might go on longer if you like it.”
She smiled.
In my head, I thought, “Hell, no, lady… I’ll be back to auditioning in two weeks.”
She looked down at her papers. I noticed how her hair stayed in place… hairspray held every strand of her chin-length bob absolute prisoner.
“You are being assigned to our Eye Research Clinic. You will work with our head researcher, Dr. O’Connor. You will report directly to him.”
She handed me a three by five index card with Dr. Shaughnessy O’Connor’s name on it, the room number and the telephone extension. She gave me directions on how to get there, and I left on my assignment.
The first thing I noticed when I entered the clinic were the shelves filled with glass containers. I moved to look more closely, but Dr. O’Connor burst into the room, face beaming with an ear-to-ear grin and deep-seated dynamic wrinkles around his poppy blue eyes. He was about six feet tall, in his forties, with thick curly red hair, fair skin, and an athletic body. Not handsome, but charismatic.
“There you are. Fantastic!” he said with a heavy Irish brogue. “Finally, they sent me some help.”
He guided me to a desk where a large stack of papers sat.
“These need to get entered into my system.” He booted up a desktop computer - one of the first I had ever seen - connected to some hospital mainframe somewhere.
“The program is pretty easy to follow, see? You just enter the information. Call me if you have any trouble, I’m just in the next room.”
I looked down at the paper on the top of the stack. A formal form with the title, “Eye donation.”
Eye donation? With growing horror, I inspected the glass containers on the shelves. They were filled with eyeballs. Eyeballs just floating around in fluid. Titles on the bottles showed their purpose… remove vitreous fluid, keep for lens research, harvest for sclera.
This was a fucking eyeball research clinic.
I wanted to throw up. I stood frozen, staring at the disembodied human eyeballs staring back at me. I forced myself to look away and started typing the information from the forms. About an hour passed, and then O’Connor burst back into the room. He never entered a room;bursting is the only way to describe it.
He looked at the diminished stack and beamed. “Good on you, Joanna. Great job! Let’s take a break. Tell me a wee bit about yourself.”
I told him about my budding acting career, my college days, all that stuff.
O’Connor continued, smiling. “You know, you can make a lot more money dissecting eyes. I need a lab assistant here. And the funding is all set.”
I was horrified. Dissect human eyes.
I shook my head and stood up, backing away toward the lab door. I wanted to run. But O’Connor would not let me go.
“Ah, c’mon, Jo… I can call ya that, right? They are only eyes. Eyes that are donated to help other people.”
Then, to my horror, he shoved his hand into a jar, grabbed an eyeball, and tossed it to me. I stepped back, letting the eyeball land on the floor near my feet. It started to roll. I thought I would faint.
“Don’t be a ninny. Pick it up.”
“No.”
The eyeball rolled to a stop right in front of the lab door. No way to escape.
I stared at it.
“Be brave. You’re a brave girl, Jo. Pick it up. Here you can use these.” And O’Connor tossed me some surgical gloves.
I don’t know what happened next… what changed my mind, but I put on the gloves and picked up the eyeball and let it roll around in my gloved palm.
“Now bring that little baby over here and I’ll show you the most amazing thing in the world.”
We went to the dissection bench. “This eye isn’t really useful for any research or transplants, so we use eyes like these to perfect dissection techniques.”
And with that, he dissected the eye. Explaining the entire process, how to remove the vitreous fluid, that stuff inside your eye that keeps it round.
“It’s used to help people with collapsing eyes.” O’Connor said. “Now, the white part of your eye is the sclera and is a sort of tough muscly type of tissue that can replace the muscle lost in burn victims. And the lens… that oval piece… there are lens transplants we are working on.”
“The eye is the most amazing part of the body, Jo. Unlike the rest of you, your eye is a self-contained intricate system, connected only to the rest of you through the optic nerve.”
He was so passionate. It was mesmerizing. And by the end of that dissection, I was hooked.
“Want to try one?” I nodded. He pointed to a jar, and I went over and put my hand in and pulled out another eye, which I then dissected.
I was hooked. So compelling. The lab assistant job was perfect for me. It paid well, with flexible hours and the work was fascinating. O’Connor was fascinating.
I worked at the lab on and off for over a year. And I learned so much, not just about eyes, but medicine, science, research.
Sure, it was a “survival job,” but one of the best I ever had.