Last weekend we went to see the exhibition Bodies at South Street Seaport, a collection of dancing, jumping, running cadavers, stripped of their skin the better to let us look at their inner workings. It was just the thing for a holiday Sunday: My wife was feeling a little low, and in need of an out-of-body experience of some sort, and our daughter (who seems wedded to her cell phone and computer these days) likes anythng gross and anatomical.

The show, which has generated some controversy, was less shocking than I had expected: maybe it was all those years of looking at my big brother’s Visible Man model as a kid but most of the bones and guts looked rather familiar to me — all though I had never seen the inner workings so animated! My favorite display featured a man’s skeleton dancing with his muscular system, a tango they both used to know so well.

The circulatory system, freed of its muscles, organs, and skeleton, looked like coral: red and spindly, as delicate as the etchings on a sand dollar. The diseased lungs and hearts of former smokers and heart disease victims got a lot of attention, too. The crowds were in some ways the best thing about the show. A lot of folks you won’t find at the MOMA were staring intently at the complex maze of material that exists beneath our skin with faces at once repulsed and relieved: Their expressions seem to say, oh, yes, I recognize you. Imagine seeing you here.

Me, I had spent a little too much time carving a 24-lb bird a few days before to really enjoy the splayed muscles separating from the bones of the bouncing cadavers. It sure didn’t make me hungry which was probably a relief to family and friends alike.

News yesterday that singer-songwriter-guitarist extraordinaire Chris Whitley had died lof lung cancer was both shocking and not. While only 45, Whitley had more than his share of problems with drugs and alcohol and had famously flamed out on stage on more than one occasion (during a Jimi Hendrix tribute at BAM a few years ago he had to be led off stage as his cover of “Little Wing” wandered off the musical map). “Couldn’t exactly call it unexpected,” my friend Jeremy Epstein wrote in an email telling me of his death.

I got to know Chris when we moved to NY from San Francisco 15 years ago. We were living in the Meat Packing District and our neighbor Ann, a hardcore rocker from Athens, GA, kept telling me I had to meet this guy, he had the most incredible record. And she was right about that: Living with the Law was the kind of rock debut that makes people sit up and take notice. The songs were dark and sexual, filled with images of incarceration and lusted after liberation. “The border town it took my hand/It was the gateway to the promised land,” he sang and the border he was hoping to cross was not one between countries. He played a mean slide guitar and had the kind of lanky, hungry rocker look that most women find irresistible.

In person he was something else: shy, almost diffident, a good dad (he and his wife split about the time I got to know him though he continued to share custody of their daughter, Trixie) and modest about his musicianship. Except when he drank or drugged and then I guess you saw another side of Chris. The loathsome Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a thinly disguised memoir of their love affair that included accusations of attempted physical abuse (sounds like he tried to hit her when he was in his cups but wasn’t so good at it) and on more than one occasion he slagged a suit from Sony when he should have been sucking up. The label was clearly hoping for something like his debut — bluesy, folky, understated — for a follow-up and the album he hit ’em with (Din of Ecstasy) was a dark wall of noise, a junkie’s lament.

I wrote about Chris for Vogue then, and a year later wrote a bio of him for the label. What I remember was how clearly he did not want to be put in a bag musically; he didn’t want to be a “long haired kid with a dobro,” he complained; the records he had cut his teeth on as a kid — living in a trailer, riding dirt bikes — were by Led Zeppelin and Johnny Winter. Sony soon dropped him and he recorded elsewhere, dabbling in electronica and psychedelia along the way. The last time I saw him was a few years ago; I was headed into the West 4th Street station, he was walking with his now-teenage daughter, attending to her words. I hardly recognized him: he had cut his long stringy hair and his face was haggard; his eyes seemed huge in his head, like the holes in a skull. He had passed me before I recognized him. I did not say hello.

Combing through the Barnes & Noble on Court Street the other day I was surprised to find a magazine display entitled “Magazines America Loves.” One of the magazines we love, it seems, is Men’s Health but we don’t love it as much as Adrien Brody who appears on the cover of this month’s issue showing off his rock hard abs. Worse, he is standing on the deck of a sail boat, shirt opened to expose aforesaid abs.

“Scrawny to Brawny!” screams the banner that covers his pelvis. “The King Kong muscle plan” this 96-lb weakling underwent is meant to promote the Peter Jackson film (in which Brody costars with Naomi Watts and Jack Black) and nothing wrong with getting in shape, especially when one is sharing the screen with Ms. Watts, not to mention a giant ape. But Brody won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist just a few years ago. Seems mighty early to be squandering his reputation as a serious actor.

But this is a guy who already did a Diet Pepsi commercial (again post Oscar) and who is slated to appear in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday. He is not a snob. Few actors have won the best-actor Oscar as relatively early in the game as Brody ( now 32) or with as little screen experience. (Peter O’Toole and Ben Kingsley come to mind but they’re both Brits, who played famous historical figures in lavish historical dramas.) These kind of career moves seem more in keeping with the long list of supporting actors and actresses who accept a statuette and then disappear, never to be seen again.

Or maybe he just really likes Pepsi.

Judith Miller said goodbye to the readers of the New York Times today — on the letters page, of all places, with the heading “To the Editor,” though clearly he knew she was leaving. I guess at that point the management figured she was a civilian and could use the same public forum everyone else does when airing her complaints about the paper and its treatment of her. Better that than have her parading around the entrance with a sandwich board and a bullhorn, screaming about a conspiracy.

Though I imagine her swan song was more judiciously edited than, say, her reporting on WMD in Iraq, it still sounded more like Edith Piaf (“Non, je ne rerette rien”) than Terrell Owens’ now-what-am-gonna-do-for-work apology. I was struck by this line in the third graf: “I am honored to have been part of this extraordinary newspaper and proud of my accomplishments here – a Pulitzer, a DuPont, an Emmy and other awards – but sad to leave my professional home.”

Golly, Judy, didn’t you read the excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s book in the Times magazine a few weeks back? Men don’t like it when you go bragging about your awards! This was echoed in Ariel Levy’s slavish, star-struck profile of Dowd in New York magazine when Mo’s good friend Michi Kakutani calls, after winning her own Pulitzer, to moan, “Now I’ll never get a date!”

Maybe Miller stopped reading Dowd after the latter slagged her in print a few weeks back, and maybe they weren’t all that close in the first place. Still, I think there must be a hilarious sitcom in there somewhere: Mo, Michi and Allessandra as three footloose girls in the city who just can’t get a date on Saturday night because of all those awards and honors and stuff, and Judy could be the old maid who lives downstairs who’s always calling to tell them to keep it down. Call it Paper Girls, or something. Roll it out on the WB and see what happens.

Personally, I like the idea of term limits for all the Times’s writers.

My daughter has been plagued by lice this year, something I thought was confined to the lower school. Seems lice don’t care what age you are, and if you have long lustrous hair as she does, they love you all the more. After several visits to the pharmacy and several treatments with lice shampoo, the little buggers returned, driving her to to tears and her parents to distraction. I had heard of a nitpicker in Brooklyn, a Hasidic woman who combed through your child’s hair the old-fashioned way and removed the little buggers and their eggs one by one. I was beginning to think of her as our last hope.

Wednesday night Franny and I drove out to an Orthodox section of Brooklyn to visit Abigail Rosenfeld, nitpicker of note. She lives in a house in what she called Flatbush, though technically it’s closer to Ditmas Park. She had been seeing people since nine that morning, including a whole family that drove in from New Jersey. They were all infested.

“In eighteen years of doing this it’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” she said, coming through my daughter’s hair. “An epidemic.” She eschews the ineffective lice shampoo and instead uses regular conditioner and a very sharp fine toothed comb to go through the hair, strand by strand. She showed me her catch, lice and nits that I had missed in my own grooming of Franny, all the while putting my daughter at ease. “Such beautiful hair,” she cooed while her kids played underfoot. She has ten (eleven on the way); the oldest was in the kitchen, studying to be a lifeguard, while the youngest was in diapers. Two small sons — Shlomo? Avika? — took turns changing him.

“When people ask me, ‘Why did I get lice?’ I tell them, ‘Cause God wanted you to,'” she said before she sent us off into the night with one of her fine-toothed combs and a promise to return for a check-up. Franny felt taken care of and I have to admit, when the lady ran the comb through my own inch-long hair and came up clean, I did too. Mazel tov, Abigail.