Siamese Twins

As a funeral Mass was said in Tijuana for Sarahi Morales and a priest assured her grieving parents that "little girls go to heaven," doctors in San Diego on Thursday reported that her sister Sarah is continuing to grow stronger. Despite the worldwide attention to the plight of Sarahi and Sarah, born Jan. 12 in Tijuana as Siamese twins and separated Saturday during delicate surgery at Childrens Hospital, the Mass was sparsely attended.

Surgeons on Friday separated Siamese twins joined at the tops of their heads, though the nearly-year-old girls who had seen each other only in the mirror still face operations to restore their skulls. Doris and Bessy Gonzales were in stable condition after surgeons at Primary Children's Medical Center separated their skulls, blood vessels and scar tissue in a 10-hour operation. An additional 2 1/2 hours were spent grafting outer membranes over their brains.

Surrealism never took root in America. When the visual arts came into their own in this country around the middle of the 20th century, the most prominent movements steered clear of Surrealism's embrace of life's unconscious underbelly. Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism dispensed with the irrational messiness of inner lives in favor of easy-to-read emblems, squeaky-clean surfaces and brainy language games. The pivotal year was 1958, when Jasper Johns first exhibited what would come to be known as his trademark works: juicy pictures of targets, flags and numbers made of torn newspaper, fleshy wax and dripping pigment, some with 3-D objects attached and others with built-in boxes, their hinged covers lifted to reveal life-size faces.

"The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild" is a road trip that involves Siamese twins, Miss Nebraska, a farm combine, a cult leader and a daughter trying to pay tribute to her hippie mother. Surprisingly, that all fits onto the stage of the Eclectic Theatre in North Hollywood, where Greg Owens' play is getting its world premiere. Quick, clever and ultimately humane, "Tulsa Lovechild" manages to straddle the painfully real and the delightfully absurd without cracking at the seams.

Tiny Julie Cline took her hand out of her mouth, chortled, and pointed a moist index finger at a nurse dressed in an E.T. costume. Not to be outdone, April Cline, her twin sister, wriggled up close to E.T.'s soft flannel nose, and gave it a good chew. Thus Los Angeles' world-famous twins, who until August were joined at the liver, showed off the nuances that make them very different people.

In a day that began with hope, soared to elation and then ended with shock and sorrow, a surgical team Saturday successfully separated 15-day-old Siamese twins, only to have the weaker twin die of cardiac arrest just an hour after the delicate five-hour operation. Throughout the day, doctors at Children's Hospital had issued increasingly optimistic bulletins that both Sarah and Sarahi Morales had a good chance to survive the rarely performed operation.

When they were born in 1949, Yvonne and Yvette McCarther, Siamese twins with separate brains and hearts but inextricably joined at the crowns of their heads, were not supposed to live more than a few months. If they did live, doctors said, certainly they would never be able to manage more than a crawl, and they would most likely be retarded, too. The mother was advised to have them institutionalized.

Sarah Morales, the surviving infant from Saturday's delicate surgery to separate Siamese twins, was in stable and improving condition Sunday, but will be watched closely for postoperative complications, doctors said. With the family's consent, skin and bone from Sarahi, the twin who did not survive, may be used to permanently close the gaping hole left in Sarah's abdomen and chest by the five-hour operation at Children's Hospital here.

When Michelle Roderick learned four months into her pregnancy that she would have conjoined twins--the kind of aberration that P.T. Barnum turned into a carnival sideshow--she spent the evening in tears. On Wednesday, the world saw her beaming with pride as she gave birth to Shawna Leilani and Janelle Kiana, a pair of beautiful girls who happen to be joined at the abdomen and share liver tissue.