You Can Keep Those Buns of Steel Forever, if You Bronze Them

Here’s the problem:

After the augmentation surgery, after the liposuction, the body sculpting, the laser hair removal and the tummy tuck, then what?

Gravity, that’s what. Gravity and cheesecake and mashed potatoes and various other forces of nature reassert themselves. And in the end you may be left with substantially what you started with, which must have been deficient or you’d never have gone for the assorted additions, subtractions and alterations in the first place.

It’s a sad old story. Nature wins.

Ah, but isn’t that exactly why Southern California was invented--to scoff at nature, deny it, transcend it? To level the playing field?

Whether it’s earthquakes or A-cups, someone in the sunny Southland will doubtless have a solution to your problem--even if you didn’t yet know you had the problem.

Ken Kalbfleish for the last 16 years has owned and operated a small Burbank metal foundry that specializes in casting bronze reproductions of famous, public domain sculptures. Sun Foundry’s catalog lists more than 400 pieces, everything from Remington’s bronco busters to Ronald Reagan’s official bust.

Sun Foundry is not the sort of place you’d expect to find gold-plated buttocks or breasts, but there they are, on the floor just beyond the saber-toothed tiger, below the Clydesdale and King Tut.

“This is poor man’s work,” Kalbfleish said, waving at the clutter of classic and Wild West reproductions that populate his office. He pats the Reagan bust right on the famous wavy hair. “There’s only so much enjoyment I can get out of old Ronnie here. We thought we could get into something a little more fun and maybe more profitable.”

That something is called Artistic Forms Studio, which wants to sell people replicas of themselves, or at least specific portions of themselves. Kalbfleish says an increasing number of customers came to him asking him to make statues of body parts they were particularly proud of. Kalbfleish got to thinking of all the people out there who have been blessed either by nature or talented cosmetic surgeons. He thought about how much they might like to preserve what God or the knife had wrought.

“They’ll spend thousands on this stuff, then . . . “ he shrugs and shakes his head empathetically at the prospect of what time and nature will do to perfect figures.

He can help, he says. As he puts it, rather more directly, perhaps, than one might wish: “I’ll copy ‘em before they fall and--hit the floor.”

To that end, Kalbfleish a few weeks ago opened Artistic Forms with the stated intent of bronzing live busts and buttocks.

Here’s how the ad copy reads:

“We professionally cast your breasts or buttocks in bronze. We form a mold by applying a flowing layer of rubber to the area to be duplicated in bronze. The applied rubber becomes a firm pliable mold in 20 minutes! When removed, we have an exact impression of your form, which is then cast in bronze, detailed and mounted on a beautiful marble base--ready to be presented to your loved one, or displayed as a work of art to the world.”

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The making of the mold is done away from the foundry, not, Kalbfleish says with a note of regret, by him. Those who have undergone it say it is the furthest thing from an erotic experience you can imagine. The entire process, from mold to bronze statue, takes a couple of weeks. For the person who has everything, temporarily, it’s a way of holding onto it forever.

It’s also a way for Kalbfleish to separate you from a not insignificant amount of cash. A basic life-size bronze--top or bottom--costs $2,250. Gold-plating is another $700.

There remains the question of what to do with it once you bring it home.

Ingrid Coree, a modest young chiropractor, won a bust of her bust as part of a television show blind date. She didn’t know quite what to do with it when she got it. For a while, stuffing it in a closet was a strong possibility. She opted instead to put it on a pedestal in a corner of her dining room and, other than telling boyfriends to keep their hands off it, “I really don’t think about it.”

Several girlfriends, she said, are interested in getting their own. And for the record, she says it’s a very accurate reproduction. Not that anyone asked.

Nicole Rodriguez, a UCLA film student and part-time dancer, has been molded and is waiting for her bust to arrive.

“I was blessed with this beautiful shell,” she said, indicating her, uh, self. “This way, I’ll be frozen in time.”

Kalbfleish is a big, affable, old-fashioned sort of fellow. He’s an obvious admirer of the female form, the type of man who will nudge you in the ribs and say: “What a cute little cupcake she is.”

Since announcing the new business, Kalbfleish has had just a handful of customers, most of whom decline to even talk about it publicly. He has no idea how popular it might become. The whole thing seems as much lark as business venture. Kalbfleish, 76, bought Sun Foundry as a means of staying out of the house and putting off early retirement from a career as an ice machine engineer. He knew nothing about bronzes or sculpture, but he took one look around the crowded little foundry, stuffed with eagles and cowboys and presidents, and saw a gift shop with “Santa Claus written all over everything.”

Speaking of which, the process of bronzing a body part takes a while. If, like Kalbfleish, you see Santa Claus everywhere, you had better hurry.