These goggles take you for a spin

Published 11:03 pm Thursday, November 15, 2007

EVERETT — Sixteen-year-old Jennifer Bowzer was trying to get people drunk. Not to really get them drunk, but to teach her fellow Everett Community College students an important lesson.

Bowzer was working at the quarterly Health and Wellness Fair to warn of the dangers of drunken driving and other reckless behavior associated with excessive libation.

So to prove her point that being drunk impairs the mind and unsteadies the body, she needed to get volunteers drunk.

Or at least come up with the closest facsimile thereof.

The Drunk Busters inebriation-simulator goggles — or a kind of beer goggles, if you will — looked like a deep-sea diving mask. (The goggles come complete with a logo of a bear holding a martini.)

Special lenses in the goggles subject the wearer to dizziness to such a degree that it simulates a drunken stupor. Then, while experiencing the simulated effects of a night out, people are asked to walk a straight line as if taking a field sobriety test.

Chris Garrido-Philp, 18, an English literature student, looked to be inventing her own form of interpretive dance as she walked the line, so much so that she eventually walked too far and gave the wall a thrashing with her flailing limbs.

“I’ve never done that before, it was kind of freaky,” Garrido-Philp said. “It made me very dizzy.”

The rest of the Health and Wellness Fair was, if not a gantlet of hypochondria, just as interesting, as well as informational.

The fair is a quarterly event put on by the Office of Student Life in conjunction with various college organizations, such as the EvCC nursing program.

About 100 students visited the informational booths in the multipurpose room of the Parks Building. Among the topics were skin cancer and methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

Nursing students Monica Burnes and Gigi Jhong presented students with flu facts: It’s much more virulent and deadly than some realize, and you can get the flu just by inhaling, a process known as “droplet transmission.”

EvCC’s cosmetology school offered facial waxes and manicures.

After all, when visited by the grim specter of your own mortality, one should always opt for a manicure.

And the beer goggles? They continued to make shambling awkwardness a spectator sport.

“I don’t think it’s very realistic,” student Melissa Ho said. “But that would scare anyone from wanting to drive drunk.”

Reporter Justin Arnold: 425-339-3432 or jarnold@heraldnet.com.