Plastinate my body? Sign me up.

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Don’t know what you’re doing this weekend, but for about 115 folks and their guests, Saturday includes a shindig at the California Science Center to meet people who -- like them -- have agreed to have their bodies impregnated in plastic (i.e. plastinated) when they die, then dissected, sliced or kept whole, and placed in exhibitions.

There will be refreshments. Mingling. Questions and answers -- and a chance to chat with Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds exhibition (which displays real, plastinated human bodies from donors in exhibits around the world, including one at the California Science Center right now).

The event, which is closed to the public, is specifically a meeting of the body donor program of Hagens’ Institute For Plastination, explains Georgina Gomez, manager of the institute’s North American body donor program. ‘Very few people are enrolled in this program, so they like to get together,’ she says. There are 795 signed-up donors in the U.S. and Canada, 132 of which are in California -- she’s one of them -- and they’re ‘everyday people like you and I, people who are teachers, husbands, wives and retirees -- really, they come from all walks of life.’

Those who choose to be plastinated by the institute upon their death must sign consent forms to that effect and arrange for the transport of their body to an embalming facility. Then they’re shipped off to the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany, where their bodies are stripped of fat and their fluids slowly replaced with plastic in a lengthy procedure that can take as long as a year. (A giraffe they plastinated recently took a record three years, Gomez says.)

Just in case you were wondering, the institute is not in the business of plastinating pets, though my crasser side immediately thought of that money-making possibility. It’s about education, Gomez said, about the structure and function of the human body. (In any case, a plastic furless Fluffy with veins, muscles and sinews revealed to full effect might not be very comforting.)

--Rosie Mestel