"The Mask"

The latest addition to my ONE Project features PPA President Kira Derryberry and one of the most unique items so far.  

Here is the story in Kira's words:

What ONE item should I use to represent what’s important to me? That’s a no brainer, a golden Val Kilmer Death Mask, of course . . . let me explain.

As an elder millennial, I grew up in the pop-culture soaked ‘80s and ‘90s. The MTV generation of rock and roll, tragically cool fashion, and popcorn blockbusters.

For me the epitome of the ‘80s superstars is the world’s greatest character actor, Val Kilmer.

Super funny in his “Top Secret”debut, the embodiment of rock and roll as Jim Morrison in “The Doors”, and blowing the doors off as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” the man never disappoints. Not to mention a criminally underrated Batman. OK, maybe not that underrated.

He was my preteen celebrity crush and I followed him with an intensity  impossible not to recognize in my daughter’s current Taylor Swift obsession.  

And like with Lucy’s love of Taylor, Val Kilmer was something I shared with my family. My mom and grandma loved his movies. My brother and I exchanged movie quotes, “I’m your huckleberry”. And my dad helped me build the first Val Kilmer fan sight on the World Wide Web, when most of my classmates didn’t know the internet existed.

While counting minutes over dial-up, I found this cast of Val Kilmer’s face on eBay, when it was still a quirky online flea market. It’s not really a “death-mask”, of course, but was formed from the mold of his face when he was fitted for prosthetics on the set of “The Island of Dr. Moreau”.

It’s a relic from my childhood that hangs in my den now. An unabashed symbol of love for the pop-culture that influenced me.

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