03:28 AM EDT on Sunday, September 14, 2003

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

CLEVELAND -- One day into the national convention of burn survivors, Linda Fisher felt hope. She had heard about camouflage makeup.

Linda, who was burned over 30 percent of her body in The Station fire, made an appointment for the next day, Thursday, at a makeshift beauty parlor in a meeting room at the hotel.

As she talked about her appointment, she started to cry.

"I never cry," said Linda, 34.

"I'm going to go get the makeup, I want to do it," she told her friend, another Station survivor. "When I go home, I'm going to go home with makeup on. I"m going to look like me."

"You are you!" she was assured. "Inside, you're you."

"Yeah," Linda said, "but I'm waiting to see the me on the outside."

LOOKS ARE big at a convention where so many people have lost theirs.

"In American society, we're all visual people," said Karen Harvey, the clinical manager of the Spectrum Health Regional Burn Center in Grand Rapids, Mich.

"They've lost their whole identity," she said. "They're trying to deal with being a different someone."

That reality is a tough one, and it hit the group from the February Rhode Island nightclub fire as soon as it arrived in Cleveland on Wednesday for the congress, a week that offers burn survivors the chance to cry at enormous open-mic sessions, to hear inspirational speakers -- and mostly, to have a week with people who look like they do.

The Rhode Island contingent, of about seven people, plus social workers and a few family members, was sent to Cleveland by The Station Nightclub Fire Relief Fund, the Rhode Island charity effort led by the United Way and the Rhode Island Foundation. The idea is that these survivors, among the 115 people who were hospitalized with burn and inhalation injuries after the fire, will be a test group, seeing how the fund might best help others who were burned.

What the fire survivors saw was that people burned 50 years ago were still scarred. And often, still wrestling with the changes in their skin and looking for help.

"Meet Louis Riina, MD Long Island Plastic Surgery Group at Booth #11" touted the fliers hung on guests' doors in the hotel.

In the exhibit room one morning, there Riina was, dressed in an olive suit and gently touching the tight face of a woman burned 10 years ago in a house fire. Could he "release" the tight skin in her neck, she asked. Yes, he told her, her neck was tight, because she didn't have enough skin there.

"There's a deficiency of skin," he told her. "It's screaming that there's a deficiency of skin."

Tables offered new therapies:

Thin sheets of shark and bovine cartilages, replacements for the skin's epidermis layer, floated in an aluminum silver bowl that was next to "before and after" pictures.

"Oat Beta-Glucan" promised to "restore skin to a velvety smooth."

Another booth was covered with hot-pink makeup bags and a sign -- "We teach patients to camouflage scars on the skin and give hope to the heart."

But, as an elder of the burn community bluntly told the survivors one night, none of these things completely erase scars from fire.

The man was Alan Breslau, the founder of the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, the worldwide organization that each year sponsors the World Burn Congress. Breslau is a charismatic man in his 70s, a former concert pianist who still plays and makes money for it.

He also has a face so mangled by fire that children are afraid of him. He was in a commuter-plane crash 40 years ago.

Breslau, who wore a gray hairpiece to cover his scalp, which was burned through to his sinuses, looked out through slits of eyes to the Rhode Island survivors gathered in his suite.

One wore pressure garments, which help with scarring, on his arms; he had lost his fiancée in the fire.

Another young woman had the garments on two badly burned arms. Among the others, there were hidden burns -- covered by long pants and long-sleeved shirts -- facial scars, and a head bald, likely permanently, from fire.

"The person you were before is gone forever . . . you'll never look the same," Breslau told them. "No matter how small your scarring is, by the way. It will always bother you. You don't look the same and you never will. The person you were has also died."

Grieve for your old selves, he told them, and allow a new person to emerge, like the mythical Phoenix that plunged into the fire and came out more beautiful than before. It would be up to them, he said, to "make something positive" of this tragedy.

THAT IS where Barbara Quayle, burn survivor and professional image expert, comes in.

Quayle, who works out of the University of California Irvine's burn center, can recall what it was like when she lost her looks some 30 years ago, at age 26, in a car explosion.

"Well, face it, Barbara," she said she told herself, "you will never have another relationship, there will never be anyone to hold your hand and kiss your lips or want to make love to you."

It took some time for her to change that belief, but she did it, with a lot of "self-help development and counseling," and by deciding that even though her face was disfigured, she was going to look as attractive as she could, with makeup, the right clothes, good posture, eye contact, and calm responses to questions about her face. It wasn't until she felt "lovable as a female" that she began to date again. She married 14 years ago.

She wrote a book, made a video, and began traveling the country, running a sort-of finishing school for burn survivors, who, she says, would never walk up to the cosmetics counter of a department store to be waited on by some young woman with "perfect skin."

Quayle is now in her 60s, a conservative who likes to talk politics and who will warmly call a new acquaintance "lovey." She is a trim 5 feet 2 inches, with a perfect bob haircut and the scent of her favorite perfume, Angel, around her. She was at the center of things at last week's World Burn Congress. She showed pictures of herself sitting on a Harley. She arrived at a Phoenix Society cocktail party divalike, one hand resting on the arm of a handsome young Cleveland firefighter, and the other hand holding up her red Cosmopolitan cocktail.

She also ran the beauty parlor up on the fourth floor of the hotel, in a meeting room named, aptly, the Blossom room.

"Blossom room!" Quayle would answer the phone. "Where women bloom."

THE BEAUTICIANS in the Blossom Room were actually burn nurses, who know what facial disfigurement can do to a person. There is a danger of depression, anxiety, and "social death," where life is lived inside with the shades drawn. "I've seen people lose their significant other, because the other person can't handle how [the burned person] looks," said one nurse, Dione Antes, from the regional burn center in Grand Rapids.

By the end of last week, the Blossom room, with its hotellike chandeliers and heavy green drapes, looked like a real salon. There were four dressing tables, each piled with brushes and various shades of Cinema Secrets, the thick, theatrical makeup that makes movie stars look perfect.

Two round tables held makeup -- "Leg Magic concealing makeup" was one -- and color swatches, which were held up to each woman's face, to see which shade brought out the scars, which shade downplayed them. There were fliers. The "Steps to Social Comfort and Confidence" gave tips for self-talk: "I love and accept myself the way I am and the way I am not."

On Thursday afternoon, Linda Fisher, The Station survivor from Cranston, came in for her appointment.

Two or three people surrounded Catherine Sagesta, who is from Taunton and who also survived the nightclub fire. Sagesta, whose hair was burned off, and whose back, arms, and part of her face was scorched, was looking into a pink hand mirror. A layer of makeup had made the scar above her right eye all but disappear. She wiped tears from her eyes. "It's a miracle," she said.

Quayle waved her hands in front of her own face: "I'm going to cry," she said, as she put in a video for Linda to watch before her session.

On the video, Quayle was saying, "I wanted my skin all one color, I wanted eyebrows, and I wanted a symmetrical lip line."

Linda, the mother of teenager and the former assistant manager of a toy store, wore jeans that covered the purple splotches on one of her legs, which was used as a "donor site" from which to take skin for the burned parts of Linda's body -- a third of her body was burned.

She wore white Nike sneakers, and a white shirt that showed the red, mottled skin on her arms, burns that still looked painful. She wore her wedding band and diamond ring on a gold chain around her neck because her hands are burned and stiff, and she wears a splint.

And lately, one pinkie is being pulled out of position by the tight contracting skin on her arm. "Contractures" are the enemies of burn survivors; the skin, trying to cover a gap, will close and pull, even dislocating joints and tugging down the lower lips of the eyes.

This is not how Linda had planned her life.

She likes big groups and parties. She likes to be the center of things. When her entire family goes out to sing Karaoke, they know everyone in the bar by the night's end.

She had been used to getting a lot of attention for her personality, and for her looks. She was used to being called "cute."

"Since the fire," she said, "it's awkward."

She doesn't lose herself in laughter like she used to, or feel that "hype" and excitement when she made plans for fun. And yes, she misses her face, the way it was, and the way she could feel attractive just because she was wearing purple and she knew it made her eyes look "wicked, wicked green."

Linda was led over to a dressing table in the corner, where she met Stacey Dreesen, a makeup artist who is a nurse in a burn trauma unit at St. Luke's Regional Medical Center in Sioux City, Iowa.

Dreesen began holding up materials of different colors to see which shades Linda should wear. The gold was clearly a miss, she said to one of Linda's friends, who was watching the makeup session.

"When I have gold" against her face, Dreesen said, "the first thing I notice is the scars around the mouth.

"This," she said, holding up the silver, " I notice eyes."

Quayle, who was running the salon, rushed back and forth between her clients, a whirl in her taupe pantsuit, and black open-toed shoes, which showed the bright red polish on her toenails. Quayle touched Linda's hair, looked in her face, and declared that one shade of pink that was being held up "really makes her skin look out of whack.'

Quayle put a headband on Linda and pushed her bangs back, so her face and her scars were bare to the natural light. Linda told them that, no, she didn't have a beauty routine anymore. She used to rub alcohol on the spots where her skin was oily, but "that was before the fire."

"I used Cover Girl, medium beige before the fire."

She had tried to put it on one day. But, she said, lifting her chin and pointing to the scar across her chin, the makeup just "slides right off" that scar.

Dreesen began the part that Linda had come for -- covering those scars. She dipped a triangular sponge into a beige foundation and swept it across one half of Linda's face.

"What do you think of this side?" she asked, as Linda tilted her face toward the mirror and saw that her scars were much less noticeable. The skin was still raised but at least it was one color.

Linda took the sponge and leaned in toward the mirror, painting her face like an artist.

"It's like a magic eraser," she said, "like an eraser taking the scars off."

Quayle looked in at the progress -- "Go ahead and get right on top of the lip line," she said.

Of everything she lost on her face, Linda missed her lips most.

Linda looked up at Dreesen, the young nurse who was doing her makeup.

"I used to have heart-shaped lips, just like her," Linda told Quayle.

Quayle said she, too, after her car exploded some 30 years ago, had wanted her "Cupid's bow" back on her lips, so she draws it on each morning. "I want them, and I get to have them, and so will you," she said.

Linda had not told her husband, Kevin Fisher, about the makeup session, she said, as she was being pampered over.

She wanted to surprise him; they could use a little lightness in their house. "Things have been tense."

He's been making a lot of decisions for me, applying for SSI, opening my mail," she said. "I just want to take back some control."

This was why she had come to Cleveland. And this was why she had decided, while at the burn conference, that maybe she'd like to pursue a new career as a motivational speaker.

And this is also why she was in the Blossom room.

On went the eye shadow, the mascara.

"It's amazing," Linda said. "I can't . . . these look so diminished."

"What it has done," one woman told her, "is focused on your eyes."

Quayle came over for the finishing touches, to show Linda how to draw an upper lip.

"I find the center of my lip," Quayle said, placing lip liner on Linda's top lip, obscured by a thick scar.

"Like it's a clean piece of paper," Quayle said. "Make a clean sweep . . . for the same harmony as the lower lip." Then Quayle drew the Cupid's bow, and Linda looked into the mirror, and her eyes, which looked especially green, filled with tears.

"I got my lips back," she said. "Thank you."

DIGITAL EXTRA: Keep up with coverage of The Station fire and its aftermath, view a multi-media tribute to its victims, find related documents and graphics, and more:

http://projo.com/extra/2003/stationfire/